SEO or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of improving the visibility of your website through search engines, particularly Google. Applying these practices can help increase both the quantity and quality of your website’s traffic.
Rather than relying on paid or direct traffic, SEO focuses on organic, natural results or unpaid traffic. Unpaid traffic can come from various sources such as news searches, academic searches, video searches, or image searches.
It is crucial for your website to rank highly on search engines like Bing and Google. Higher rankings mean greater chances that your users will become potential customers. But how can you achieve this? And how does SEO actually work? In this guide, we will answer these questions and more.
What Is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, refers to the practices used to improve a website’s ranking and increase its visibility on search engines through organic searches. SEO focuses on increasing three main factors for your website:
- Organic Search Results: This refers to the traffic you can obtain from the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) without paying for advertising space.
- Quantity of Traffic: Once you’ve ensured the right users are visiting your site via SERPs, the next step is to focus on increasing the overall traffic to your site.
- Quality of Traffic: It’s essential that the visitors coming to your website are genuinely interested in the products or services you offer. For instance, if a potential customer searching for video games ends up on your site, but you’re selling video creation tools, it’s unlikely you’ll convert that visitor into a sale.
SEO is about answering people’s questions before they even ask them. You need to have an understanding of the keywords they’re searching for and the type of content they seek. Understanding your audience’s intent allows you to connect with potential customers who are searching for solutions to their problems.
How Does SEO Work?
Nowadays, most people rely on search engines to find answers to their questions, whether they’re complex or simple. Whatever you need to know, you can type it into Google, and a long list of search results will appear. But how does this process actually work? To provide you with results, search engines perform crawling.
Crawling is when search engine crawlers visit pages recognized by the engine, extract information, and then index those webpages. Once a page is indexed, it’s sent to the algorithm, which matches the user’s search query to the page’s data. However, Google and other search engines use additional ranking factors to determine a page’s ranking:
- Technical: Web page ranking is often determined by factors related to the overall performance of the website rather than individual pages.
- On Page: This focuses primarily on the amount of relevant information, including queries and keywords, present on the webpage.
- Off Page: Google uses metrics such as backlinks that point to a webpage.
This covers the “search engine” portion of SEO, but what about the optimization? Website optimization focuses on the content. Your website is more likely to rank higher if it features quality content that clearly communicates what your business offers. At the same time, it should provide search engines with the relevant internal links, meta descriptions, title tags, and keywords needed to accurately understand what your business is about and what users are searching for.
These are the main aspects of SEO, but there are other factors involved in being successful at SEO. This includes link building, strategies, keyword research, social network integration, web design, and feedback processing.
What Makes SEO So Important?
SEO helps search engines like Bing and Google determine which websites should rank higher based on specific terms or queries. Without these SEO techniques, the system could be easily manipulated by bots, and large companies with big budgets could dominate the rankings. However, modern SEO techniques create a more level playing field, reducing the chances of manipulation. This ensures that every site earns its ranking fairly.
To make sure your website appeals to visitors and ranks higher on search engines, you must put effort into your content. Typically, users are more likely to choose businesses that appear at the top of search engine results, considering them more credible than those with lower rankings. Therefore, SEO is essential if you want users to visit your website.
SEO allows you to increase your website’s traffic without spending money on expensive advertising space, making it the most cost-effective technique for boosting traffic.
What Does SEO Writing Mean?
SEO writing refers to blog posts that are highly optimized using relevant keywords and phrases. SEO writers help improve your website’s ranking on SERPs through organic results. The topics these writers focus on typically relate to the products or services you offer.
For example, if you sell gardening supplies, you could write articles like “How to Grow a (Name of Plant)” or “Top 5 (Name of Product)” featured on your website. However, it’s not just about posting as many articles as possible or overloading them with keywords.
The key here is content—quality matters. Your content should be useful, providing answers to users’ questions, with the goal of converting them into potential customers. SEO writers are responsible for analyzing keywords and identifying questions they can answer. Generally, there are three main types of searches that users perform:
- Transactional – Users are looking for products or services to purchase.
- Informational – Users are seeking relevant information on a specific topic.
- Navigational – Users are searching for a particular website.
What Are Keywords?
When people search for phrases on engines like Yahoo, Bing, or Google, the suggestions they see are based on keywords and how well SEO has been implemented.
At Agile Development, we can help you build a website that uses SEO techniques to rank higher on search engines. Get in touch with us at https://agiledev.org/, and let us take your website to the next level.
