SEO Overview: What? Why? And How?
- Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Sometimes it is hard to explain people what SEO is and why we need it. We have faced this kind of scenario at our work place, many times with our colleagues and even with management. Here in this blog I have tried to explain “What is SEO”, “Why we need SEO”, and “How do we do SEO”.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. As an SEO, we have to consider how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience.
Why we need SEO?
SEO helps users/visitors/customers to locate our website (products & service) easily via search engines. Potential customers might not even know that our website (products & service) exists. SEO can make the content of your web pages more relevant, more attractive, and more easily read by search engines and their crawling and indexing software.
- Absence of Risk: Paid advertising is subject to various frauds (click fraud, spam, negative).
- Reliability: Banners, TV ads or paid search engine placement work until the marketing budget depletes, and then disappears (customers/new visitors cannot find us any more). SEO helps buffer this process, consumers are more likely to purchase from a site ranked high in the search engine results than from an evidently placed advertisement.
- Targeted Traffic: SEO helps getting potential customers to our website. The visitors that SEO brings are looking for our products/services as they have entered our keywords/phrases into the search engines.
- Brand Awareness: A web site having a high ranking means more people see the name of the company and become familiar with the company and its products, even if they haven’t made a purchase.
- Affordability: Comparison to Banner s, eMail, SMS, TV ads etc. which cost a lot, SEO cost almost nothing.
SEO is the best investment for any company.
How to do it?
The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a website.
A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results.
On-Page Optimization:
- Title Optimization
- Meta Tags Optimization (Description, Keywords)
- Important HTML Tags (h1, h2, h3, Bold, Italic)
- Rel="Canonical"
- Keyword Research, Density
- Link Optimization
- Image Optimization (ALT, filename, size)
- Rich Snippet
- Body Text
- User Experience
- PageSpeed
- Site Architecture (URLs)
Off-Page Optimization:
- Link Building
- Directory Submission
- Social Bookmarking Submission
- Article Submission
- Press Releases
- Blog Posting
- RSS Feed Submission
SEO is an on-going process of optimizing the website with current search engine algorithm, best practices and guidelines. Continues monitoring and optimizing the website pages, checking and fixing errors (404, 500 etc.). Maintaining Site Architecture, optimizing the tags, getting backlinks, and encouraging social sharing. Removing duplicate content and avoiding spamming the search engines and black hat techniques. And it cost almost nothing.
Joydeep Deb is a Senior Digital Marketer and Project Manager with strong experience in Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Online Brand Management, Marketing Campaigns, Project Management, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), PPC, eMail Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Technologies, Web Design and Development.
With an MBA in Marketing. IIM Calcutta Alumini. Lives in Bangalore, Karnataka - India.