Search Engine Optimization (SEO): What is it, and Why is it Important?





Optimizing for the search engine is the process of gaining visibility of a web page or a website within the search results. These fall into “organic” or “natural” as they are un-paid. The point of getting a site ranked higher in the search is so to extend the brand to as many users as possible. The more that people see a certain site, the more likely they are to click on it. This results in free traffic from the search results page and is the primary goal of search engine optimizers. There are numerous kinds of search such as the academic search, video search, local search, image search and news search. Although most companies focus on ranking in Google due to its popularity, there are other vertical search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, DuckGoGo and many more along with industry-specific ones which can only work well depending on the client’s niche.

When coming up with strategy for the internet marketing campaign, the SEO has to reverse engineer how the search engine thinks, how people use it, what terms or keywords are searched for as well which ones will convert best and which of the engines will work best for the particular demographic. Before creating even one backlink the expert providing the SEO services should first make sure that the site is ready for the campaign. Website optimization consists of cleaning up or correcting HTML code, improving the relevance of the content, obtaining a clean validation, increasing page speed and fixing any indexing issues. Browsers are very good at allowing bad coded sites to appear but there might be issues in the source code that either don’t allow a certain page to be indexed (read by the search bot) or has a no-follow attribute and is then ignored. Messy code is also very disrespectful to the user and pages shouldn’t ever take more than a second or two to load. These things are taken into consideration when a site is being ranked even though it might not seem important to the owner.