TL;DR
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is crucial for businesses aiming to enhance their online presence. By improving user experience, attracting organic traffic, and boosting credibility, SEO helps businesses stay competitive and achieve measurable results. Consistent SEO efforts also contribute to increased brand awareness over time.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a method of optimising a website’s content and structure to improve its visibility and ranking on search engines’ result pages.
SEO is an important aspect of search engines that helps you reach more audiences online. If you are a beginner, learning SEO can indeed be overwhelming. However, with the right approach, you can learn the SEO elements in no time.
But what is the right approach to master SEO? And where do we even begin? Let’s understand everything there is to know about SEO.
What Is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a combination of two terms: Search Engine + Optimisation. As the name suggests, it is about optimising a website with the purpose of improving its visibility. Here’s a breakdown:
Search Engine: A Search engine is a program designed to assist a user in finding information online. It scrutinises millions of websites and presents the most relevant websites to the user. Some of the major search engines are: Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex.
Optimisation: Optimisation is about making the best use of something. In the context of websites on search engines, it involves the measures to improve the various aspects of a website to provide a better user experience.
The Basics Of Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation, or simply SEO, is the process of optimising a website so that search engine crawlers (search bots) can find and rank the website. It is an effective method of bringing organic traffic to a website by improving its user experience.
To understand it better, before a website reaches a user, it has to go through search engine crawlers that inspect its usability for the audience. If these search engine bots find the content useful for the audience, it gets ranked on the search engine result page when someone searches a related query.
Essentially, SEO is divided into the following areas:
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On-page SEO
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Off-page SEO
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Technical SEO
An expert SEO agency combines all the areas of SEO for a website to get higher rankings and achieve sustainable outcomes. Now, before we break down each type of SEO, let’s first understand the functionality of a search engine.
How Does a Search Engine Work?
Essentially, search engines use software programs called web crawlers that explore the web to find new and relevant sites and get them indexed. These crawlers are the search engine bots that discover and organise the most useful content for users. Before a piece of content reaches the final audience, it has to first go through search engine bots.
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Crawling: Search engines have their own search bots called crawlers or spiders that explore the internet for valuable content to be indexed.
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Indexing: The discovered content is stored and organised in structures called an index. When a certain page is indexed, it means they are ready to be displayed on search engine results pages.
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Ranking: Once the content of a site is indexed, the search engines show the most relevant and valuable pages at the top of the results pages when a user enters their query.
The Major Types Of SEO
Search engine optimisation is mainly of three types:
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On-Page SEO
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Off-Page SEO
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Technical SEO
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On-Page SEO: This involves all the measures taken on the website related to its content and structure. This includes: URL structure, content optimisation, title tags and meta descriptions, internal linking, and image and icon optimisation.
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Off-Page SEO: In off-page SEO, we take actions outside the website to improve rankings. This includes: backlinking or link building, managing reviews, citations, and content marketing
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Technical SEO: Technical SEO is about optimising the technical side of a website. In simple words, it involves improving website loading speed, mobile friendliness, security, crawlability, and more.
Why Is Search Engine Optimisation Important?
Unlike paid advertising and social media, SEO brings organic traffic, provides sustainable results, and is considered more credible among searchers.
Here’s how search engine optimisation helps a business:
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Improve user experience
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Attract organic traffic
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Improve business credibility
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Stay competitive
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Get measurable results
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Improve brand awareness
SEO enhances your website’s usability by ensuring it’s easy to navigate, loads quickly, and provides valuable content. A well-structured site keeps visitors engaged, reducing bounce rates and encouraging them to explore more. This positive experience can lead to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
By optimising your site for relevant keywords, SEO helps you appear in search results when potential customers are looking for services you offer. This targeted approach attracts visitors who are more likely to convert into leads or sales, providing a steady stream of organic traffic without ongoing ad spend.
Improve Business Credibility
Ranking higher in search results often signals to users that your business is trustworthy and authoritative. An SEO agency employs practices like obtaining quality backlinks and creating informative content to contribute to building this credibility, making customers more confident in choosing your services.
Many businesses invest in SEO to maintain visibility. By implementing effective SEO strategies, a digital marketing agency ensures your business remains competitive, appearing alongside or above competitors in search results, which can influence potential customers’ decisions.
SEO allows you to track various metrics such as website traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates. These insights help you understand the effectiveness of your strategies, enabling data-driven decisions to continually improve your online presence.
Consistent SEO efforts increase your visibility in search results, leading to more people discovering your brand. Even if users don’t click on your site immediately, repeated exposure can make them more likely to recognise and trust your brand in the future.
The Bottom Line
Search engine optimisation helps you reach more people online and build brand identity in a crowded market. It is an important aspect of online marketing that helps in website visibility and brand awareness of a website. Whether you want to learn SEO for your website or want to start your career in SEO, we have discussed the basics that a beginner needs to know.
Stay tuned with Blacklisted for more valuable insights on digital marketing, SEO, web design/development, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is a method to effectively optimise a website to get higher rankings on search engine results pages.
SEO is mainly of three types: On-page SEO for website content optimisation, off-page SEO for creating backlinks to increase DA and technical SEO for technical website aspects like page speed.
Absolutely! SEO is a great career option for people who are interested in the technical aspects of search engines. It offers a great opportunity for flexibility and career growth.
While the basic understanding of coding can help you in technical SEO, it generally does not require hands-on coding expertise.
Not necessarily. Though it might feel overwhelming at first, it takes time and consistency to master the techniques of SEO.
