What is SEO

The most probable reason that you are willing to find ‘what is SEO’ is that you have or are planning to have a website. Now, start by understanding that there exist millions of websites and a few hundreds of them are in direct competition with yours. One way to beat the competition is to appear among the top search results on the search engine result pages of the popular search engines.
For that to happen, you need to practice SEO, that is, Search Engine Optimization that accomplishes the task organically (read naturally) and can make the traffics of the internet users parade to your website. Yes! The users whom you can delightfully call your business “leads”, “prospects”, “future customers”, etc.

Let us understand some of the terms used above one by one:

• Search Engines: The digital versions of the good old yellow pages and business directories used to search for businesses, products, services, and so on.
• Web Traffic: Simply, the users who search using search engines with the intention to buy from or get associated with the online business providers in one way or the other.
• SERPs: The search engine result pages that are simply indexed like the pages of a directory, but in a much more valuable manner (and not just chronologically).

So, How Are the SERPs Generated?

Search engines, like Google, have digital programs called crawlers or spiders which are programmed to crawl to different websites relevant to the search queries that the users (read searchers) type. Now, as these crawlers bring back hundreds of thousands of results back, there has to be an arrangement to rank them in the order that the most valuable ones appear on the first page, followed by the others on the subsequent pages. This arrangement is called search engine algorithms.

These algorithms use some important parameters to decide the ranking order. Now, it is the real time when you need to know what is SEO and how it helps a website to pass these parameters. Search engines want its users to go to the “good websites” only – the websites that are technically flawless, the websites that offer high-quality content and the websites that are being recommended by other platforms, mediums, and websites.

Three Important Parts of SEO

Technical SEO: It deals with the very first impression that a website makes on the search engine crawlers, based on which the algorithm decides whether it should be ranked among the top results or not. For example:
• Relevant domain and URL structure
• Robots.txt, 404 page and XML sitemaps
• Internal navigation
• Website speed

Your web designing expert should take care of this part while building the website itself.

On-Page SEO: This part deals with the quality of content that the search engine algorithms find either superior or poor and thereby decide the site’s rank. For example:
• Is the content original, useful and well-researched?
• Use of relevant keywords naturally
• Use of formatted meta tag, meta description, page titles, etc
• Loading speed of images, videos, etc
• How well the internal pages point to one another?

Off-Page SEO:

It deals with how popular your site’s pages are. In other words, it is the arrangement in which the quality external sites link back to your website. It is done through:
• Creating smart content and sharing it on article directories, blogs, etc
• Getting active on social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc
• Creating useful infographics, images, videos, documents, etc and sharing them on relevant sites
So, the answer to what is SEO is that it is the technique to build high visibility and presence online to remain in the good books (rather good pages) of search engines. Without SEO, your site has all the chances to succumb to the competition.

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