“What is SEO?” is a question we hear quite often from our clients. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the biggest marketing strategies used by businesses today. SEO can be a budget friendly way to make your website content visible to the public. Although to most people, who don’t understand how SEO works, it can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Let us walk you go through what SEO is and how it works for businesses.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website content in order to increase organic or un-paid traffic to your website. By making certain changes to your website design, content and code, your site is deemed more significant by Google and the other search engines. As a result, Google is likely to determine that your website is relevant to a user’s query, and display your website as a top result on its results page.
To determine which websites are relevant to which queries, “spiders” will scan your website and index its content. If it determines that the site is easy to navigate along with other factors, it will be ranked higher in the search engine results page.
For example, let’s say you have an article about how to build a tree house. In order for the right people to read your content, you will want to optimize this article so that it shows up as the search engine’s top result for anyone who searches the phrase “build a tree house.”
A couple of factors that affects the search results include keyword density, age of site, and authority.
Keyword density is when your specific keyword (what the blog is about) is mentioned in the headline and several times in the copy. So, if “build a tree house” were your keyword, it would be in the headline and stated several times throughout the copy. The age of the site also plays a huge effect, the older your site the more reliable it will be perceived by search engines. Authority is the relative importance of your page. This is influenced by the quality of other websites linking to your page. To learn about other factors click here.
How SEO Works in Four Stages
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Publish your web page
It’s important to note that search engines will review individual pages of your website and not your website as a whole. Therefore, it’s important to optimize every page in order to rank high in the search results.
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Search engine robots crawl and index your page
Even if your pages are published, Google needs to be able to find them. Google does this by sending robots out to scan your pages. These bots will collect every word in every page of your site and follow any inbound or outbound links to learn as much as possible about your website. This is why link building in SEO is important.
Robots cannot see images on your site, so every image must have alt text. Alt text is coding added to an image that describes to the robots what the image is. The same can be said of videos- all videos must have captions.
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Search engine uses algorithms to determine your rank
After reviewing your pages, the robots will collect all the data and insert it into algorithms that determine the main keywords in each of your site’s pages, how relevant your pages are in relation to similar sites, and how much authority is assigned to your pages. (View other factors here.)
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Search engine displays the page in its search results
When someone types in a keyword in Google, and your page fits that keyword (based on Google’s algorithms,) it will show up in the search results.
There are many factors that determine if Google will rank your website at the top of its results page. We’ve listed those factors for your convenience here. If you need a helping hand in optimizing your site we’ve got you covered. Contact the SEO Experts at Electrum to learn how we can help!