As you venture into the online business scene, you will be confronted by this term with a smirk. At first glance it may seem intimidating, but it really isn’t when you get used to it – well, it does need a little bit of technical know-how. In the online business scene, one needs to get used to the fact that there are marketing strategies tailor-made for online businesses aside from the contemporary ones taught in business school. SEO is one of those new-fangled marketing strategies made for the internet. It is a field that is little understood by outsiders.
In simple English, Search Engine Optimization is making your website appear higher in a search engine results page for keywords that are relevant to your business. Let’s say you have a website that sells used car parts. When a user searches for “used car parts” in Google or any other search engine, you have to ensure that your site ranks as high as possible on the search results to ensure that the searcher, who is a potential buyer, will visit your site. This ensures that more people get to visit your site because people trust the results of a search engine and will more likely open the links that are higher up on the page.
SEO is like quality control for webpages. Search Engines rank web pages according to its relevance to the search keyword. Achieving a place higher up on the search results page is the ideal scenario for webmasters. SEO checks for and increases the quality of webpages. SEO practices are created to help search engines in deciding what webpages to put up top.
That said, search engine algorithms are closely guarded secrets of search engine companies. And there are many factors that affect the ranking of webpages in a search results page. These are also dynamically changing and what could have been a valid SEO practice yesterday might not be tomorrow. Web crawler is a term for an automatic web indexer that is used by search engines. It crawls through webpages and is the one that determines the quality of the page.
For an online business or any other website that is dependent on traffic, search engine optimization is an important step your website’s marketing campaign. A webpage that is optimized is more valuable to its owner. Though some SEO practices require you to dwell on the technical stuff like the website’s source coding, there are also simple but equally valuable practices of SEO. The number of keywords on a webpage and the number of links to your webpage usually matter, but just as important is the content of your webpage. Search engines value those webpages that are really relevant to the search keyword very highly. So if your webpage sells used car parts, your webpage must talk about used car parts. Create content that helps search engines understand that your webpage is really an important page with regards to used car parts.
