SEO, as mentioned before, stands for search engine optimization. When you practice SEO, what you do is make sure the quality and quantity of the content on your website is channeled towards increasing the traffic on your website. 

This is meant to give it more visibility and also expose your brand to as many potential customers as possible. This is an organic way of getting better results when someone looks up information might have. 

It is a critical part of marketing your product or service on the internet because trillions of searches are being conducted on the internet every year and there are an innumerable number of websites that are competing with you to get the same set of eyeballs.

A lot of these are commercial operations and searches are a big part of how users find brands and their services. When you do a good job with search engine optimization, your website gets better rankings for keywords/keyphrases from the search engines and that improves your brand’s visibility. This gives you a very real shot at converting a regular visitor to the website into a paying customer. 

This is no longer the open secret that it used to be a few years back. This means businesses have gotten good at tricking search engines to rank their webpages higher to get visibility. 

So, search engines are constantly tightening the screws by changing the parameters through which they rank websites to make the search results more useful to the user instead of benefiting businesses with subpar content. This is why you need to be on your toes and in the loop on new practices. 

Search engines are also trying to retain traffic on their search results pages instead of redirecting users to other webpage because advertising is how they make their money. This is why you see certain features on the homepage. 

Think about this. The search engine results page or SERPhasbothads and organic results. One such feature is the featured snippet, also referred to as the answer box. There are also image carousels that do the same thing except they are for pictures. This feature gives the user a direct answer to a specific question instead of redirecting them to a different webpage. 

So, if the user types “London weather” or “convert cm to inches”or “Sydney time now”, they won’t just be given a list of websites or be taken to a website that answers the question. Theyseeaboxthat answers the question or in the case of a conversion, allows them to enter the numbers and get the results right away. Youwillalso notice similar boxes for queries that can be answered by sites like IMDb and WebMD. 

Search engines are able to make money more efficiently when they cater to the users’ needs by keeping them on the SERP pages for a short period of time (it might be confusing, but this means that the user found what he was looking for in a short time). 

But lucky for businesses, some of this can be beaten fair and square with good search engine optimization techniques. Thiscanbe done for paid and organic content. That’s how when a user types a direct question into the search panel, they get a brief summary of text from the highest-ranking page which possibly answers the question right away. This could be an organic result based on good SEO.

Circumventing strategies that keep the user on the SERP page and getting them to your page requires a little more strategizing. That’s what makes search engine optimization a big part of many marketing strategies drawn out by companies both big and small. 

At the heart of it, SEO is basically just understanding the words your potential customer is typing into a search engine when looking for your website and how you can use that knowledge to draw them towards your website instead of your competition. 

So, it is fundamentally about understanding your customers. And the good news is that the tips and tricks you learn from search engine optimization don’t have to be limited to your website because it essentially teaches you how to use language more effectively which can be applied to social media and get your website more traction from social media platforms which are big magnets for online traffic.

The other side of this practice is understanding what the crawlers employed by search engines are looking for so that you can get visibility. A search engine looks at documents, pictures, videos and any other type of content you have on your webpage. All of this is cataloged and that process is known as crawling and indexing, which are two different things. When a user types a query, this cataloged information is used to decide how relevant the content on your website is to their query. That is how your page gets ranked. Now, the first thing to know when I talk about ranking is the accuracy of keywords. That’s the next topic to dive into.