SEO, short for Search Engine Optimisation, is all about optimising your website for search engines, such as Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com or Ecosia.
By the phrase optimising your website for search engines, what we really mean is making your website more visible, by ranking higher in search engine listings, when people type in specific keywords or phrases.
SEO helps the internet user because the quality of search engine listings they are being presented with are likely to be more relevant to their keyword or phrase enquiry, but of course, it also helps the website owner, because the internet users that get directed to their website via search engine listings are more likely to be potential customers because they are more likely to be looking at content that is more relevant to their keyword or phrase search. Therefore, SEO is all about improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website from search engines. It is all about RELEVANCE and PROMINENCE.
SEO is aimed at achieving organic and more longer term results, rather than websites which are high in search listings just because they are paying the search engine for it, referred to as paid traffic or inorganic traffic. If you are paying Google to bring you up the search listings, you are likely to disappear down the rankings as soon as you stop paying them. SEO {organic traffic} can be via text / content in a website, images, videos, news and other media. Consequently, there are many ways you can achieve SEO success. SEO is carried out because a website is likely to receive more relevant and targeted visitors when the website in questions ranks higher in the search engine for the keyword or phrase search being used by the visitor.
There are quite a few ways to help make your website more prominent in search results. Examples of methods include:
Page Design can have an effect on whether someone likes your website and trusts your website. If users bounce off your site quickly, it scores negatively against your website and affects credibility of the website.
Updating Content to keep search engines crawling back frequently, can increase the kudos of your website.
Cross linking pages within your website so as to have more links to important pages of your website, can improve visibility.
Page Speed helps. The faster and more efficient your website works, the better it helps your website's prominence.
Frequently Searched Keyword Phrases. Writing content which includes frequently searched keyword phrases will tend to increase traffic.
Metadata. Adding relevant keywords to a website page's metadata, including to title tags and to meta descriptions, is likely to enhance the relevancy of a website's search listings, and thereby to increase traffic to your website.
HTTPS Secure Site. Making your site a HTTPS secure site helps in terms of not just security, but it is also likely to help in terms of credibility and prominence. HTTPS helps to create a secure channel over an insecure network. HTTP is not encrypted, and therefore it is vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks, letting attackers gain access to website accounts and sensitive information, modify webpages, inject malware, inject advertisements, and so on. HTTPS is designed to withstand such attacks and is therefore considered to be secure against them.
Mobile Compatibility. More and more people are doing searches on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, instead of or in addition to, laptops and desktops. As a consequence, it is important that your website is also mobile compatible, as mobile compatibility is taken into account by Google and other search engines, and thereby you can increase your prominence via mobile compatibility.
So, there you go. An introduction to SEO. This is just some of the main points. I hope you found this article helpful, and please leave us a like!
