What is Search Engine Optimization & Why It’s Important
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The internet provides a great platform for people to sell their products and ideas online through their website. Having a site is essential in the current world of business. However, just having a website is not all. The chances are that there are hundreds or thousands of other people who have the same business ideas and they deal in the same products and services as you. Search Engine Optimization comes into play to ensure that when a potential client looks up for the product or services you are rendering, they see you as among the first results.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is a process that affects the visibility of a website in a search engine. It can be described as a set of rules that, when followed, improve the ranking of a site on the various search engines. The SEO methods used vary from the technical practices that can be taken from behind the scene to the promotional approached like social media marketing and link building.
Why add Search Engine Optimization to your website
Most of the people who look up for products on the internet only look up to the third page of the search engine at most. In fact, most people always stop on the first page when they don’t find what they are looking for in the search results. Only a handful get to the second and the third page. Optimizing your website basically, means that you are providing it with a robust architectural framework and providing clear navigation that makes it easy for the search engine to index it quickly and easily. As a result, your website will appear among the first in the search results.
Your website is your brand image to the world and being at the top of the search engines means that most visitors will have you as one of their options and, also, their trust in your brand will be higher. You will get more visitors to your website and consequently a higher conversion rate.
How to go about Search Engine Optimization
The idea is to make your website content match what the search engines consider relevant to a given search request. As Bitgale highlights below are some of the critical aspects that search engines look for when listing search results that should be focused on when optimizing your website.
Relevance and quality of the content
Search engines have been tuned to provide the most relevant results possible. They, also, try to highlight only content that is of admirable quality. That is why you need to update your website often with content. It is because only the most current and most relevant results will be produced as search results. If your web content dates months or even a year back, chances of the same being shown among the top results are quite slim. SEO helps in making your web content relevant and of the right quality for the search engine to pick it up fast.
Site Speed and User Experience
The more appealing your website looks, the better for you. You can achieve this with Search Engine Optimization. Your website needs to be easy to navigate, have relevant content and relevant internal linking and, also, have an excellent site speed. Site speed has, over the years, emerged to be a huge differentiator factor for search engines. As you would expect, those websites that have a higher website speed are favored over the slower ones.
Internal Linking
Proper internal linking provides your site visitors with extra reading and viewing options that are relevant to the subject, helps improve your ranking on the search engines for specific keywords and helps the search engine index your site much faster. Search Engine Optimization entails ensuring that your internal linking is at its best.
Title tags and Meta descriptions
A Meta description is a short text under the URL to your site that provides a sneak peek of what a searcher can find on your website. While having a Meta description does not improve your search engine rankings, it increases the chances of a visitor clicking on your site. It means that Meta descriptions lead to more traffic, which, in turn, results in a higher conversion rate.
Title tags help inform the visitors and the search engines on what exactly your site is all about concisely and accurately. Search Engine Optimization entails including Meta descriptions and Title tags to your website to ensure that your site gets more traffic and hence higher conversion.
Images that are properly tagged
Search Engines, also, provide image results from the various websites with the relevant search content. They can only show results for images that have been appropriately tagged and adequately described. Search Engine Optimization, also, entails a proper and accurate description of images on your website with the precise and most relevant words to improve the chances of your image appearing among the top results. It, also, improves your site’s accessibility.
Search Engine Optimization helps you stay in a winning position on the online platform. You, therefore, should endeavor to optimize your website for the search engines for you to realize more traffic and more conversion from your site.
