Search engine optimization

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There are many digital marketing strategies, but one that has tremendous potential to help you grow online naturally: SEO.

You've probably heard how important SEO is and wonder, "Does SEO really work?" This is an important question to ask, especially in our digital-first world. Read on to learn if SEO really works and how to use it to your advantage.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so that its pages are easier to find, more relevant and popular for user search queries and, as a result, search engines rank them better.

Search engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit both the user's search experience and page rankings, with content that meets the user's search needs. These include the use of relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headings (H1), among other SEO best practices, descriptive URLs with keywords instead of strings of numbers, and schema markup to specify the meaning of page content.

Search engines help people find what they are looking for online. Whether researching a product, looking for a restaurant, or booking a vacation, search engines are a common starting point when you need information. For business owners, they offer a valuable opportunity to drive relevant traffic to your website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting your website to rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP) so that you get more traffic. The goal is usually to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that make the most sense to your target audience. So, SEO is as much about understanding the needs and requirements of your audience as it is about the technical nature of how to configure your website.

Does SEO Really Work?

Yes, SEO really works. SEO is essential for organic online growth and if you do it right, your website will be found by an incredible number of internet users quickly. This increases brand awareness and increases the likelihood that these users will convert to customers.

It sounds simple, but there is more to SEO than having an optimized website. Read on to learn:

* What is SEO?

* Why SEO is an important marketing strategy

* Common SEO Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

What is SEO?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website so that it ranks higher in search engines. The higher a website ranks in search engines, especially on the first search engine results page (SERP), the more likely people are to find your website when they search.

There are many factors that affect SEO, including:

* Page speed

* Domain Authority

* Site crawlability

* Mobile-friendliness

* Quality of materials produced

* Number of relevant inbound and outbound links

These are just a few of the many factors to keep in mind when thinking about your SEO strategy. It comes technically as a goal to create the best possible user experience.

How do search engines work?

Search engines return results for any search entered by the user. To do this, they survey and "understand" the vast network of websites that make up the web They run a sophisticated algorithm that determines which results will be displayed for each search query.

Why SEO focuses on Google

To many, the term "search engine" is synonymous with Google, which has about 92% of the global search engine market. Since Google is the dominant search engine, SEO usually revolves around what works best for Google. It is useful to have a clear understanding of how Google works and why it works.

What Google wants

Designed to provide the best search experience to Google's users or searchers That means delivering the most relevant results as quickly as possible.

The 2 key components of the search experience are search terms (user input) and search results (output).

Let's say you search for "Mailchimp Guides and Tutorials". This is a clear, unambiguous finding. Google understands what you're looking for and delivers a useful page as the top organic result — Mailchimp's own page with that title.

From Google's perspective, this is a very good search result and a positive user experience, as the user is likely to click on the top result and be happy with the result.

Why SEO is a Critical Marketing Strategy

SEO is an incredibly important part of your marketing strategy because it helps build brand awareness, drive organic traffic to your website, build authority and trust within your industry, and build relationships with new and existing audiences. Let's discuss exactly how this happens.

Building Brand Awareness

The more you focus on SEO, the higher your website will rank in search engines. The higher your website ranks, the more people will find your brand. The more people find your brand, the more brand fans you get who can eventually, become brand enthusiasts. This is why your brand messaging strategy online is also important.

Driving organic traffic to your website

If you're not trying to spend a fortune on paid advertising, focusing on your SEO strategy is a key way to generate organic inbound traffic. Instead of paying to appear to Internet users, you create a strategy that provides them with the best user experience so that they come to you naturally.

Building authority and trust within your industry

A big part of SEO is creating relevant content that is valuable to users. Usually, this valuable content is intended to solve someone's problem, which means it takes some skill to write about it. The more you create high-quality content that showcases your expertise, the more you'll build your reputation among your audience and your competitors.

Google will also reward you if you create valuable content for people. The better quality content you create, the higher your chances of ranking on search pages. If you get to the first SERP for a high-search term, your website can get a lot of organic traffic.

Build relationships with new and existing customers

SEO helps you build relationships with new and existing customers because it helps them find you and your content faster. The more they see how your content helps them, the more trust you'll build with them. The greater the trust, the more likely they will eventually convert to customers.

SEO can help you attract new audiences and convert. The higher you rank for keywords, the more chances people have to find you. The right webpage or piece of content can help you tap into an audience you couldn't before.

How Google makes money

Google profits from people trusting and evaluating its search service. It achieves this by providing useful search results.

Google also offers businesses the opportunity to pay for placement of an ad at the top of search results pages The term "advertisement" refers to these listings Google makes money when searchers click on these pay-per-click (PPC) ads, which you purchase through AdWords. You'll especially see these ads on more generic questions.

Except for the small label, these search results are almost indistinguishable from other search results. Of course, this is intentional, as many users click on these results without understanding the ad.

This depends on Google. More than 80% of the $182.5 billion that Google generated in 2020 was from advertising. So while search functions remain its core product, it depends on its advertising business.

Common SEO Mistakes

There is great potential with SEO, but there is also room for error if you are not careful. Here are some common SEO mistakes to avoid and why.

Targeting wrong keywords

When you create content, you want to target relevant keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords, (keywords that are not relevant to your business or content) can confuse Google and you could end up reaching the wrong audience entirely. Instead, do keyword research and find out which ones are most relevant to your business and audience so you don't waste your resources.

Keyword stuffing

How often you use a keyword in a piece is important for SEO purposes, but trying to use the keyword as often as possible in your content, known as keyword stuffing, can actually hurt. Google is smart enough to know when you're trying to trick it, so if you stuff keywords in hopes of ranking higher, it'll just block your content. Instead, use keywords where it is relevant and natural for the user to encounter the entire content.

Linking to random external sites

Linking to external sites helps with SEO, but you need to think about the quality of those external sites. If you are linking to random websites that are not seen as legitimate, it can block your content. Instead of linking to random websites, link to quality external sites that rank well. This way, Google knows that you are linking to reputable websites and legitimate content

Missing Meta Description

Meta descriptions, which are short paragraphs of text that appear below your website links in SERPs, are a valuable piece of real estate. It gives users important context about your content and whether it will help them find the answer they're looking for. Don't ignore it; Instead, write a clear and concise meta description that tells Google and your audience that the content is worth reading.

The anatomy of search results

SERPs consist of paid search results and "organic" search results, where organic results do not contribute to Google's revenue. Instead, Google provides organic results based on a site's assessment of relevance and quality. Depending on the type of search query, Google will also include different elements such as maps, images or videos in the SERP.

The amount of ads on a SERP depends on what users search for. If you search for the term "shoes," for example, you'll likely find a significant number of top advertising results. In fact, you probably have to scroll down the page to find the first organic result.

Such a query usually generates many ads because there is a strong possibility that the searcher is looking to buy shoes online, and many shoe companies are willing to pay for a feature in the AdWords results for this query.

On the other hand, if you search for something like "Atlanta Falcons", your results will be different Because this search is mostly associated with professional American football teams with this name, the top results are related to that. But this is still a less obvious question. You will find news stories, a knowledge graph and their homepage. These 3 types of results above indicate that Google doesn't know the exact purpose of your search, but provides a quick way to learn about the team, read their latest news or visit their website.

Because there appears to be no purchase intent behind the query, advertisers are unwilling to bid on the keyword, so there are no AdWords results.

However, if you change the query to "Atlanta Falcons hat," which signals to Google that you're shopping, the SERP results will change to more sponsored results.

Should I Hire An SEO Agency?

If you are thinking of hiring an SEO agency, do it. An SEO agency takes the guesswork out of your SEO strategy and gets you the results you want.

The role of SEO

The goal of SEO is to increase your ranking in organic search results. There are different practices for optimizing AdWords, shopping and local results

While it may seem like many competitors taking up real estate in the SERPs push organic listings down, SEO can still be a very powerful, profitable endeavor.

Considering that Google processes billions of search queries every day, organic search results are a very large slice of a much larger pie. And while securing and maintaining organic rankings requires some up-front and ongoing investment, every click that sends traffic to your website is completely free.

Search engine optimization

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Showing up on Google's results pages is not a given. Convincing a search engine to direct traffic your way demands a certain amount of insight

On the one hand, search engine optimization (SEO) is technical, inherently complex and in a state of perpetual flux, which is reserved for the few who have mastered it. But on the other hand, most of what Google wants to do with its powerful arsenal of algorithms is deliver relevant, reliable results. And that's good news for those working with limited resources.

As Google gets better at rewarding quality content and genuine links, the first steps to optimizing your website and improving search engine rankings are getting easier in many ways. Here are the basics.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic can originate from many different types of searches, including image searches, video searches, academic searches, news searches, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that guide search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are used by their target audience. is preferred. . SEO is done because a website will get more visitors from search engines when websites rank higher in search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

Search engine optimization History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing websites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were indexing the early web. Initially, all webmasters had to do was submit a page address, or URL, to various engines, which would send a web crawler to crawl that page, extract links from it to other pages, and return the information found on the page. Initiated process A search engine spider downloads a page and stores it on the search engine's own servers. A second program, known as an indexer, extracts information about the page, such as the words it contains, where they are located and what weight is given to certain words, as well as all the links on the page. All this information is placed on a schedule to be crawled at a later date.

Website owners recognize the value of high rankings and visibility in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the term "search engine optimization" was probably coined in 1997. Sullivan credits Bruce Clay as one of the first people to popularize the term.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as keyword meta tags or index files in engines such as ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guideline for each page's content. Using metadata to index pages has proven to be less than reliable, as the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag is likely to be a misrepresentation of the site's actual content. Erroneous data in meta tags, such as those that were not correct, complete, or false attributes, made it possible for pages to be incorrectly identified in irrelevant searches. Source a page in an effort to rank well in search engines. By 1997, search engine designers recognized that webmasters were struggling to rank well in search engines, and some webmasters were even altering their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Altavista and Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings.

By relying heavily on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusively within the webmaster's control, early search engines were subject to abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search engines have had to adapt to ensure that their results pages show the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages filled with countless keywords by unsociable webmasters. This means moving away from a heavy reliance on term density to a more holistic process for scoring semantic cues. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to generate the most relevant results for any given search, poor quality or irrelevant search results may cause users to find other search sources. Search engines respond by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that are more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

Companies that employ overly aggressive tactics may ban their client websites from search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company called Traffic Power, which used high-risk tactics and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired magazine reported that the same organization sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google had in fact banned Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines also reach out to the SEO industry and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, webchats, and seminars. The major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with website optimization. Google has a sitemap program that helps webmasters know if Google is having trouble indexing their website and provides data on Google traffic to the website. Bing Webmaster Tools provides a way for webmasters to submit a sitemap and web feed, allows users to determine the "crawl rate" and track the index status of web pages.

In 2015, it was reported that Google was developing and promoting mobile search as a key feature in future products. In response, many brands began to take a different approach to their Internet marketing strategies.

Relationship with Google Search engine optimization

In 1998, two Stanford University graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created "Backrub", a search engine that relies on a mathematical algorithm to determine the importance of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links. PageRank estimates how likely a given page is to be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web and follows links from one page to another. In fact, this means that some links are stronger than others, because a page with a higher PageRank is more likely to be reached by a random web surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among a growing number of Internet users, who loved its simple design. Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) were considered to avoid manipulation seen in Google search engines. which only consider on-page factors for their ranking. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link-building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved equally applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focus on exchanging links, buying and selling, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involve creating thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.

By 2004, search engines incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors into their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. In June 2007, Saul Hansel of The New York Times stated that Google ranks sites using more than 200 different signals. The leading search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Some SEO practitioners have studied different approaches to search engine optimization and shared their personal opinions. Patents related to search engines can provide information to better understand search engines. In 2005, Google started personalizing search results for each user. Based on their previous search history, Google generated results for logged in users.

In 2007, Google announced a campaign against paid links that shift PageRank. On June 15, 2009, Google revealed that they have taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by using the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google bots will no longer treat no follow links, similarly, to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow to sculpt PageRank. As a result of this change, the use of nofollow led to pagerank evaporation. To avoid the above, SEO engineers have developed alternative techniques that replace noload tags with obfuscated JavaScript and thus allow pagerank sculpting. Additionally, several solutions have been suggested, including the use of iframes, Flash, and JavaScript.

In December 2009, Google announced that it would use all of its users' web search history to populate search results. On June 8, 2010, a new web indexing system called Google Caffeine was announced. Designed to allow users to find news results, forum posts, and other content after publication much sooner than before, Google Caffeine has changed the way Google updates its index so that things show up on Google faster than ever before. According to Cary Grimes, the software engineer who announced Caffeine for Google, "Caffeine delivers 50 percent more new results for web searches than our last index..." Google Instant, real-time-search, was introduced in late 2010 to search results. Make it more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. As social media sites and blogs grow in popularity, leading engines have made changes to their algorithms to rank new content faster in search results.

In February 2011, Google announced the Panda update, which penalizes websites that contain duplicate content from other websites and sources. Historically websites have copied content from each other and benefited from search engine rankings by engaging in this practice. However, Google has implemented a new system that penalizes sites whose content is not unique 2012 Google Penguin tried to penalize websites that use manipulative tactics to improve their rankings on the search engine. Although Google Penguin is presented as an algorithm aimed at fighting web spam, it actually focuses on spammy links by determining the quality of the sites the links are coming from. The 2013 Google Hummingbird update featured an algorithm change designed to improve Google's natural language processing and semantic understanding of web pages. Hummingbird's language processing system falls under the newly recognized term of "conversational search," where the system pays more attention to each word in the query to better match pages with the meaning of the query, rather than just a few words. Regarding changes to search engine optimization, for content publishers and authors, Hummingbird aims to solve problems by getting rid of irrelevant content and spam, allowing Google to produce high-quality content and rely on them to be 'trusted' authors. 

In October 2019, Google announced that they would begin implementing the BERT model for English-language search queries in the United States. Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) was another attempt by Google to improve their natural language processing, but this time to better understand their users' search queries. In terms of search engine optimization, BERT is intended to more easily connect users to relevant content and increase the quality of incoming traffic to websites ranking on search engine results pages.

Search engine optimization Methods

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Search engine indexing

A simple diagram of the Pagerank algorithm. Percentage shows perceived importance.

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages linked from other search engine-indexed pages do not need to be submitted as they are automatically found Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ, two major directories that closed in 2014 and 2017 respectively, both require manual submission and human editorial review. Google offers Google Search Console, for which an XML sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that cannot be automatically discovered by following links without their URL submission console. . Yahoo! Previously operated a paid submission service that guaranteed crawls for every click; However, this practice was discontinued in 2009.

Search engine crawlers can look at different things when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by search engines. The distance of pages from a site's root directory can also be a factor in whether pages are crawled or not.

Today, most people are searching on Google using mobile devices. In November 2016, Google announced a major change in the way websites are crawled and began making their index mobile-first, meaning that the mobile version of a given website becomes the starting point for what Google includes in their index. In May 2019, Google updated their crawler's rendering engine to the latest version of Chromium (74 at announcement time). Google has indicated that they will regularly update the Chromium rendering engine to the latest version. In December 2019, Google began updating their crawler's user-agent strings to reflect the latest Chrome version used by their rendering service. The delay is to give webmasters time to update their code so that certain bots respond to user-agent strings. Google has conducted evaluations and feels confident that the impact will be minimal.

Preventing Search Engine Crawling

Main article: Robot exclusion standard

To avoid unwanted content in search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories via the standard robots.txt file in the domain's root directory. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (typically <meta name="robots" content="noindex">). When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt file located in the root directory is the first file crawled The robots.txt file is then parsed and will instruct the robots about which pages cannot be crawled Because a search engine crawler can keep a cached copy of this file, it can sometimes crawl pages that a webmaster doesn't want crawled. Pages that are typically blocked from being crawled include login-specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches. In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should avoid indexing internal search results because those pages are considered search spam. In 2020, Google sunsetted the standard (and open-sourced their code) and now treats it as an indication, not a directive. To adequately ensure that pages are not indexed, a page-level robot should include meta tags.

Increasing prominence

Various methods can increase the prominence of a webpage in search results. Cross linking between pages on the same website can improve visibility to provide more links to important pages. Page design makes users trust a site and want to stay once they find it. When people bounce a site, it counts against the site and affects its credibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases that are relevant to different types of search queries tends to increase traffic. Updating content so that search engines crawl it frequently can add extra weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's metadata, including title tags and meta descriptions, will improve a site's search listing relevance, thus increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages accessible via multiple URLs, using canonical link elements or 301 redirects, can help ensure that links to different versions of URLs count for all pages' link popularity scores. These are known as incoming links, which point to URLs and can count towards page link popularity scores, which affect a website's credibility.

Also, recently Google is giving more priority to the below elements for SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position).

* HTTPS version (secure site)

* Page speed

* Structured data

* Mobile compatibility

* AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

* BERT

White hat versus black hat techniques

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories: techniques that search engine companies recommend as part of good design ("white hat"), and techniques that search engines do not approve of ("black hat"). Search engines try to minimize the effects of the latter, including spamdexing. Industry commentators classify these methods and practitioners who employ them as white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hats generate results over a long period of time, whereas black hats assume that their sites may eventually be banned temporarily or permanently after search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO strategy is considered a white hat if it complies with search engine guidelines and does not contain any deception. Since search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or orders, this is an important distinction to note. White Hat SEO is not just about following guidelines but ensuring that the content that a search engine indexes and ranks later is seen by users. White hat advice is typically creating content for users, not search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to online "spider" algorithms, without trying to trick the algorithm from its intended purpose. White hat SEO is similar in many ways to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved by search engines or involve fraud. A black hat technique uses hidden text, either as colored text as a background, in an invisible div, or positioned off-screen. Another method returns a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking. Another category sometimes used is Gray Hat SEO. This is between black hat and white hat approaches, where the methods employed avoid penalizing the site but do not serve to create the best content for users. Gray Hat SEO focuses entirely on improving search engine rankings.

Search engines can penalize sites discovered using black or gray hat methods, either by lowering their rankings or by dropping their listings from their databases entirely. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by search engine algorithms or by manual site review. An example is in February 2006 Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for using deceptive practices. Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages and restored them to Google's search engine results page

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