SEO short for Search Engine Optimization is a common term that marketers or business owners will talk again when it comes to getting traffic to their website and getting to the 1st page in the search engine. While this may be easy on the surface but when it comes to the process part, many people will either get confused or frustrated as there are so many ways to do SEO that create an impression that Search Engine Optimization is complex and time-consuming to do.
One way to define SEO is to imagine that it is a supermarket where you need to buy ingredients and drinks to prepare your meal. You can go to the particular aisle or approach the store assistant to find out whether the store sells a particular brand and which aisle to find them.
This concept is similar to Search engine optimization as it is a practice to increase the quality and quantity of online traffic to the website using organic search engine results. This means that using specific keywords in the search engine, it can attracts people to click on the website’s link and the higher the SEO ranking for your site, the better is your website’s Search Engines Results Page (SERPs).
To explain further in technical terms, SEO starts the moment you enter in the keyword in the search engine inquiry page, search engines like Google or Yahoo will send a crawler to gather information on the internets that have relevant data. Once the information is found, the crawlers will bring all those 1s and 0s which is the binary code back to the search engine and build an index. This index will feed through the search engine’s algorithm to match all that data of the query as closely as possible.
It is also important to know that paid advertisements that appear in the search results is a different method from SEO as the company needs to pay to the search engines company to advertise their products or services whereas Search Engine Optimization focuses on getting the best page ranking for the website (usually in the first page) without paying extra for the target keywords.
To determine how well the ranking factors of website fared in the search engines, below is a short list that uses Google as a benchmark since it is one of the most popular search engines in the world.
- Keyword usage – Domain Level
It is to determine if the domain name matches the primary keywords exactly or partially contains the primary keywords type in the search engine
- Brand Metrics – Domain Level
It is the process to establish a reputation online and offline to increase the brand awareness and ranking of the website.
- Social Media Metrics
Social media metrics are a method that use data to gauge and determine the impact of social media activity base on the company’s revenue and reputation.
- Link Features – Page Level
It’s a feature in SEO that shows the quality and quantity of links in every individual page of the website and is an important factor for ranking well in the search engine.
- Link Authority Features – Domain Level
Domain Authority (DA) is the ranking score for a search engine that predicts how well a website can rank on SERPs. It is usually calculated by evaluating several factors such as the number of total links and linking root domains into a single DA scoresheet.
- Engagement and Traffic/query data
This data checks the traffic flow and what is the engagement level of the website. The more people interact on the website, the better its rank for SEO.
Doing SEO may be a truanting process for beginners but you can overcome it by learning from experts online, attend an SEO course or hired professional SEO companies to run the show for your website. The bottom line is doing SEO takes time and patience but the reward will be great when you see the results which led to better sales for your business.
