Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving a website’s visibility in a search engine’s organic search results section.
With the arrival of search engines, the need for keywords also surged.
When the Internet started to prove itself as a good business channel, a struggle to attract organic traffic arose making search engines a very important part of a business’ marketing strategy. From there, SEO became vital.
To begin to understand what SEO does, it is important to say that it can be divided into two groups. On-Site SEO: On-Site SEO:
On-Site SEO:
This type of SEO cares about relevance. It ensures that the website is optimized correctly so that the search engine understands its content.
Off-Site SEO:
It is a part of SEO that focuses on external factors to the web page we want to rank. The most important factors in off-site SEO are the number and quality of links it gets from other sites, a presence in social media, mentions in local media, brand authority, etc.
Once we know what SEO is, we must identify whether or not we are following a search engine’s SEO best practices.
How do search engines work?
The operation of these engines can be summarized in two steps: tracking and indexing.
Tracking
A search engine crawls the website with what are called search bots. These browse the entire site through its links, hence the importance of having a great site structure.
It is the bots themselves that decide which pages to visit, the frequency and the time they will crawl that website. This decision is made based on the websites’ sitemaps and links on other third party sites among many other onsite and offsite ranking factors.
Indexing
Once the bot has collected all the information, all these pages are included in an index. Here, they are ordered according to their content, authority, and relevance. This way, when a user makes a query to the search engine it checks its index to provide results that are the most related to a users search phrase and intent.
Why is SEO so important?
The most important reason SEO is a must business-wise is that it proves to be helpful for both users and search engines. SEO is a fundamental process to “translate” a websites’ content into a language search engines can understand and determine if it is useful for other users or not. Once you have invested in your website development, SEO helps rank your website in positions closer to the first page in order to organically generate leads that could become clients.
