What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Do you interact with the following screen when you open your browser? If your answer is “yes” to this question, then you are not alone. All the people in the world, who use the internet, confront this screen when they go online.

At least 93 percent of the people opening the browser sees this screen. You can guess from this how much Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important. According to Google, more than 100 billion searches are done only on Google. And this number is increasing day by day.

What affects the search results?

The search results that we get when we put a query in Google depend on the following factors. There are many search engines but we usually refer to Google when we talk about the search engine. The reason is that it is the most used and most known search engine.


Query type


It is the combination of words that we put in the search engine. This can be “best movies of the years”, “SEO books pdf” or something else. If we put a name, it will be thinking if it is a public figure and then will provide the information.


Your social graph


Google knows about your email contact list, your Twitter profile, your Facebook profile and so son as all this information is public. Now if your friend has bought a mobile phone from an online shop and has indicated it good. You will most probably get the link of that online mobile shop if you search to buy mobile online.


Your location


Google knows your location from your IP address and other settings. Some of the search results may also be triggered due to your location. For example, if you are searching for restaurants, it will most probably show you the restaurants near you.

Authorship


Authority of a domain has also effect on the information you get in search results. You will get a result from authoritative domains on your first page. Authority of domain days before was calculated just by the number of backlinks. But it has now adopted a more sophisticated calculation mechanism. Still, links tell a lot about the authority of a domain if they are high-quality links.

Your Profile


Google knows about all the emails that you send or receive. It does not matter how boring your emails are but it will read them. It wants to know more and more about you. This is then used for showing you ads of your choice also. If you have asked a suggestion from your friend about the best hosting company. It will show you the ads for hosting companies. So your profile has also effect on the search results that you get.


Your Past Behaviour


If you rely on the article of a particular health practitioner and prefer to read them. You will click on its link in the search result even if it is in the fifth position. Google notices this behavior. With time, Google will show you the article on that website in the first position to help you find the information easily. Therefore your past behavior has also effects on the search results that you get.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search engine optimization is a set of techniques to get high-quality traffic from search engines. You will have to understand the intent of the user to get high-quality traffic. When people search, they search for a solution. If people are searching for the best mobile phones in 2019 and you have them, you are facilitating them in finding a solution to their problem. The only thing is to tell the online searchers that “Hi, I have the mobile phones that are best in 2019”. But you will have to tweak this information in a manner that fits better in the algorithm of Google and that is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. SEO is an ongoing process. It means that what is valid today may not be valid tomorrow. It is because Google and all other search engines change their algorithms regularly to help the users get better information.

You might have noted that all the businesses in the world are going online. The reason is that online customer finding is not only cheap but also easy if the business is optimized for search engines. If a business wants to find customers in a large city, it will have to open a minimum of five branches. But if the same business opens a website, it will not only save money but will find customers who will be targeted and also global. And that is the reason which leads to the creation of thousands of websites day by day. And they are competing for ensuring their digital presence. But it is important to note that no business will ever survive in the future without a digital presence. But now the question is how Google ranks a page?

What are the factors affecting SEO?

Content


Content is king. You must try to give value to users if you are giving them something to read. You must provide them the best solution to their problem. If you are producing awesome content, people will automatically link to your content. “Hi, this guy has solved the problem very efficiently”. You will get many social shares and it will build your authority.


Technical Factors


There are some other factors such as the speed of a website, navigation structure, page size. These factors are large in number and I am trying to grab them in a separate article. These technical factors also contribute to search engine optimization.


User Experience


User experience was in a time before less important but now it has got more weight in SEO. User experience can be measured in Google analytics. The bounce rate, average session duration, and the number of page views a single user navigated, etc determine the user experience.

Conclusion

This was just an introduction to Search Engine Optimization. Read other articles about how to achieve the main goal. This article was for beginners. There are other articles for people who want to improve their SEO skills. If you have any questions, write it in the comment section. Your questions really help us improve our knowledge base.

Engr. Rahamd Ullah
Engr. Rahamd Ullah
Articles: 83
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