The internet or the World Wide Web has revolutionized the way we live today. It’s like no one can survive without the internet these days. More than half of the people log in to the internet every day. Internet became so popular with the arrival of web 2.0 where people were allowed to connect with each other. Then started the revolution of user generated content on the internet, where people started creating content for the World Wide Web. With this change, the internet started flooding with creative content, posting and sharing. People started using internet more and more. Nowadays people are used to search internet for almost everything. The knowledge is rotated and getting updated over the internet every second.
People search the web to find what they need. For an example if I need to buy office stationery, I would search the web using a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The terms, words or phrases that are used to search are called as keywords. These keywords are what we use in our normal day to day life in a human language. As an example I could Google search for “places to buy office stationary” which will return set of books stores or shop results to buy office stationery. Just like that people are searching the web to find products and services. The World Wide Web consist more than billions of websites and uncountable content. Like I explained search engines are used In order to find what they’re searching for. A search engine can search the World Wide Web instantly and return the results with what you are looking for in seconds. Web search engine is a software that can go thru the internet to find and retrieve the information you are searching for. Search engines are consisted with web crawlers (spider) that can crawl through all the web pages. People enter above mentioned keywords as search queries and the Google crawler bot goes through all the pages in its index and find relevant results and display them to the user.
What is search engine optimization?
Search engine optimization is the process involve in maximizing the visibility of a website on the World Wide Web. In other words it’s the process of getting a website appearing on organic results from search engines. Once your website gets the proper visibility, it will be visible to your target audience without a problem. There are two types of optimizations,
1.On page optimization
On Page optimization is done on the web page itself. The simplest way to understand on-page optimization is like understanding the way to write a standard article. First you put the title to say what’s this article is all about. Then after a small introduction in the body, the subject will be explained thoroughly and the main points about the article will be highlighted. More information is explained under subtopic with a proper conclusion. The same way Google understands what a page is about and without proper on-page optimization it is hard to rank on the Google at all.
2. Off page optimization
Anything done outside the website in order to market the website is known as offsite optimization. Off page optimization mainly covers link building, social media and brand management. Link building is a natural process where helping users to find your website by putting a link with the related search term or the keyword, mostly known as the anchor text. It is good to help people with your website link where it’s necessary. Most common places to build links are blogs, forums, articles and website directories and social media. This multi-link appearance can bring your website a ranking value and the expected visibility.
Why do businesses need SEO?
There are billions of websites on the internet & thousands of websites selling the same products and services. The question is when somebody search for the products or services you offer, how do your target audience find your website out of those thousands of websites on the internet. People are more likely to settle with what they find on Google first, satisfying their needs. If the above office stationery example is taken, when somebody Google search for “place to buy office stationery” your website should appear within the first few results for you to make that person in to a customer. If you do not have proper visibility on Google, your customers won’t be able to find your business. It doesn’t matter if you have excellent product or services. If you do not have a proper visibility, your website will not get any traffic (visitors) and people wouldn’t know that you have those awesome products. That is why businesses need SEO to gain profit and attract visitors online. The diagram below shows the main traffic sources that drives traffic to websites.
Is it worth investing on SEO?
SEO is a value added service. And it should be done regularly to keep the search engine ranking positions alive. By investing in SEO for your website you will gain the return by gaining customers. Return on investment (ROI) is guaranteed with search engine optimization. SEO is a professional service and it is not very cheap in the market. Since it’s a hard task to maintain ranks and to survive in the competition a website must have SEO done.
Check out this interesting flowchart diagram about SEO, drawn by Creately flowchart software.