Search Engine Optimization

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What is Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a marketing strategy used to improve the ranking of a web page in the organic or unpaid section of online search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Naver, and others. This is different from the paid search campaigns which is sometimes referred as the Search Engine Marketing.

As part of any SEO strategy webmasters uses various techniques of webpage design to improve the likelihood of that page coming on top when a person executes a search with specific keywords. Most popular search engines ranks webpages and not websites using a method called indexing to determine which webpages shows up at top for specific keywords.

As a marketer responsible for digital or online marketing it is important that your organization’s pages appear at top of search queries. It is estimated that the click through rate (CTR) for natural sections of search engines is 75% compared to 25% for the paid sections[1]. In addition, 63% of the clicks are performed on the top three search results[2]. Therefore, if an organization’s links are not appearing at the top of search results people are not going to find its products or services.

It is important to note that people often don’t make online purchase decisions by clicking on the unpaid section of search engines. Therefore, the unpaid sections have been viewed as an important area to promote the awareness of a company’s products or services. It is essential that an organization prioritizes the online metrics that it want to drive through its SEO strategies.

Other areas to improve SEO objectives are videos, images, podcasts, news, PDFs. All these different web contents need slight adjustments to improve the SEO performance.

SEO is also commonly used as an acronym for Search Engine Optimizers. These are consultants or service providers who can help their client to improve their webpage pagerank[3].

Following is the 7 largest search engines engine ratings on the global usage.[4]

1. Google 55.2%

2. Yahoo 21.7%

3. MSN Search 9.6%

4. AOL Search 3.8%

5. Terra Lycos 2.6%

6. Altavista 2.2%

7. Askjeeves 1.5%

Techniques to improve SEO

From Google’s standpoint, pagerank of a webpage is dependent on the following factors:

The age of the domain and the relevance of its content. It is based on the premise that stable webpages are more trustworthy.
The number of other sites linked to the webpage. When a number of websites are referring to a webpage it is taken as a vote of confidence.

Therefore, webmasters uses the following techniques to improve SEO. It is estimated that 25% of the SEO can be attributes to on-page techniques and 75% to off-page techniques.

On-Page SEO

Title tags, meta data and URLs
Content
Internal linking (helping the spiders find your site)
Blogs

Off-Page SEO (factors outside your site affecting ranking)

Link-building
Getting new Links
Link bait
Blogs
Social media

Other Types of Search Engine Optimization

SEO isn’t just for regular websites and the big three search engines. There are other types to optimize web site for local and mobile search, as well as social media.