In today’s fiercely competitive market, it’s becoming almost mandatory for businesses and brands to optimise their digital properties in order to improve their visibility, search-ability and ultimately grow their businesses.
What is Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an investment in your future that offers real value to a brand/business; apparently it is more important than ever.
If you own a website, online store or blog, then it’s obvious that you’re looking for traffic. SEO is designed to do just that and more—generate traffic, improve your online presence and help your business to grow and meet its objectives.
It’s therefore paramount for every webmaster to understand the exact meaning of SEO and the potential it presents to businesses.
So exactly is SEO?
Search engine optimisation is a set of rules or guidelines used by blog or website owners to optimise their web sites for search engines in order to boost their search engine rankings.
Each day, major search engines receive millions of users searching for answers to their queries or solutions to their problems. The most critical element of SEO is the ability to make a web site friendly to both the users and search engine robots.
Even though search engines are getting increasingly complex, they can’t understand or see a web page like humans. But that’s where SEO comes in to help them figure out what’s on a page and how it can be useful to users.
Scenario
Just imagine taking a picture of your favourite puppy and posting it online. A human may describe it as a “white, little impish dog, looks like it just had a nice massage.” On the other end, the most powerful search engine in the world might struggle to comprehend the content in the picture anywhere near that level of complexity. How on earth can a search engine understand a photo? Thankfully, SEO enables webmasters to give clues that engines can employ to understand the content. For that reason, having a proper structure in your content is vital for successful SEO.
Having a good understanding of the potential and limitations of search engines enables users to understand both the abilities and limitations of search engines, allowing them to accurately design, develop, layout, and annotate their website content in a way that permits search engines to digest it with ease.
Additionally, SEO helps to improve the quality of a website by ensuring it’s faster, user-friendlier and easier to navigate.
With proper SEO, a web site becomes visible to search engines and provides great insights into who your real customers are and taking you to them.
- Reasons why SEO is important
- Improved visibility
- Increased, higher quality traffic
- Enhanced trust/credibility
- Better branding
- Cost-effective marketing
- Generates higher ROI than most marketing channels
Ensure your content can be found in search engines
Having every technical detail of SEO-friendly web design done right is essential, but after all the basics are captured, you must get your content out there—market it!
Search engines have no formulas and hence cannot measure the quality of web content. Instead, search technologies depend on and measure the metrics of importance and relevance to track what people do, discover, comment, react and link to.
In that regard, building a cool website and writing great content isn’t enough; you must market that content and get your fans to share and talk about it.