Internet usage has increased drastically in these days, may it be through smartphones or laptops. These advancements brought in many changes and advancements in the world of business. SEO is one of the remarkable advancements that took place in the world of business. SEO is nothing but Search Engine Optimization.
What Is SEO?
Prior to starting a discussion, what is Search Engine Optimization, it is essential to learn what is a search engine. “A Search Engine is a web-based tool, that assists the users to search and locate the information they require on the internet”. Some of the popular Search Engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN.
Now after getting to know what is a Search Engine, it would be quite easy to understand what is Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the number of visitors for a website by obtaining a high ranking in the popular Search Engine result pages.
Hence, it is clearly understood that SEO is very essential for the development of any business in today upgraded world of business. Getting and idea of what is SEO, now it is important to understand why it is essential for every online business to adopt this SEO strategies in order to be successful.
Why is SEO essential and How does it work?
Any business can be possible only through proper investments. A general misconception that many business people have is that, investment of SEO is not very essential. Just imagine what would be the position of a stationary store, which is in a place where there are no people going around, because of which, the availability of store is not popular. It is the same with a website also. If the website is not visible to the users, then it has to finally collapse.
The main aspects that reflect the compulsion and importance of investing in SEO marketing related activities are as below:
SEO brings in good traffic to business:
SEO benefits the businesses in many ways, one of which is the volume of traffic coming in to visit theirs website. In the above example of a stationary, the store was incurring losses, because of the location it is in. The visibility factor is of equal importance to a website. The higher the visibility of a website, greater would be the profits incurred by a business.
SEO is cost effective and helps in increasing the market share:
In this world of smartphones and tablets, people are always preferring to check the online review before purchasing any product or service. Hence by adopting the SEO strategies your business can be successful in making yourself on the first page of the search results of many popular search engines.
When compared to the costs of other online marketing tools like PPC and PPC advertising, social media marketing, or purchasing leads for an email marketing program, SEO provides fairly good ROI and is cost effective also.
SEO provides optimal user experience and reach:
These days it can be observed that people have got a general tendency to believe in the online search results obtained. SEO gives the user an experience of the fastest and the most relevant search results. This satisfies the visitors and successfully converts them into customers. There are many other benefits provided by these SEO strategies.
How Does It Work?
Crawling, indexing, and providing appropriate answers are the two major functions of the Search Engines.
Crawling and indexing:
The search engines always make use of the best available path as they have to crawl the entire population. The link structure of the web serves to bind all the pages together. Once these search engines receive all the links, then they select the best links from among those and publish those selected links. In order to accomplish the task of holding the billions of pages to access in a fraction of seconds, these search engine companies have constructed data centers all over the world.
Providing appropriate answers:
One of the important tasks of these search engines is to assist the user with appropriate search results. Hence, the search engines select only the best links to publish on the results page.To a search engine, relevance means more than finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and search results were of limited value. Over the years, smart engineers have devised better ways to match results to searchers’ queries. Today there are hundreds of factors influencing the relevance.
Hence, it is very important for all online businesses, to adopt SEO marketing strategies, in order to give relevant results to the customers.
Problems faced by SEO:
SEO is beneficial to all the businesses, but there are some problems faced by these strategies.
Duplicate pages: Websites using a CMS (Content Management System) often creates a duplicate version of the same page, this is a major problem for search engines looking for an original content.
Uncommon terms: Text is sometimes written in uncommon terms, which cannot be understood by the people. This is a major problem faced by Search Engines.
Non-text Content: Although the engines are getting better at reading non-HTML text, content in rich media format is still difficult for search engines to parse. This includes text in Flash files, images, photos, video, audio, and plug-in content.
Poor link structures: If a website’s link structure isn’t understandable to the search engines, they may not reach all of a website’s content, the minimally-exposed content may be deemed unimportant by the engine’s index.
Conclusion:
Hence, SEO is a very us important marketing strategy to be adopted by every online business in order to be successful. To sum it up, Search engine optimization or SEO is a way to optimize your website so that search engines will understand it better and give you higher rankings.