What is SEO, How Does it Work?

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It is a method of positioning your website on the right ‘street’ of the digital world and ensuring that your ‘signage’ is potent enough to attract all the right people. Your business website gets optimized so that it earns the placement that’s most productive for your goals – but how is that done?

Location can make a positive impact on the success of an offline business; the heavier the traffic, the greater likelihood that some passerby will decide to pull in and make a purchase (generally speaking). On the internet, the search engine’s results page is like the busy road and your website’s listing upon it is like the exterior sign you would have on your physical storefront or office.

What is SEO? A Simple Explanation

Just like a car’s engine powers the vehicle that takes the user to their destination, a search engine powers the search results that brings the searcher the information they seek. Like mechanic work, SEO is a hands-on job.

How SEO Works and Why It Will Always Be Relevant

Learning how SEO works can help you to sort through fact and fiction, dispel any myths, and reap the benefits. Search engine optimization isn’t magic and its usefulness isn’t dying; there will always be a need to determine the order by which search results are displayed. For the sake of user experience, that order cannot be random.

Having humans manually decide the order of each result in every search would not be logical, don’t you agree? Instead, the rank of a web page is determined by a formula, or algorithm.

Search engine optimization, therefore, means working to achieve the right values for as many factors of the ranking formula as possible. If anyone tells you that SEO is just about using the right words on a web page, don’t listen.

Google’s search algorithm uses approximately 205 ranking factors to calculate what position a web page’s listing will appear in the search results pages. How well your page ranks for a keyword depends on two main things: the quality of your SEO and the quality of your competitor’s SEO, if you have one. Can You Rank a Website Without SEO?

Approximately 15 percent of the more than 500 million Google searches performed each day are unique. Since the keywords used in these searches have no popularity, there’s a good chance that no one has optimized a web page to rank for them – and that would mean there’s no competition to outdo ranking for them.

Assuming that the website without SEO has also not been penalized, it is possible for one of its pages to appear in the search results during one of the unique, competition-free, desperately low volume searches – but how much website traffic can you expect to get like that? Not much.

Why SEO is Essential for Business Websites

You want the rankings that help you get the best return on investment from your website, don’t you? Proper SEO brings more traffic to your site – and that’s targeted traffic filled with the people you want to reach, like eager buyers.

SEO helps your business get noticed on the web. Not doing it is like having a business location on a busy street but without a sign; customers who would’ve come in and shopped don’t come in because they can’t find the store – it has to be visible from the street.

So, what is SEO? It’s a cornerstone in the foundation of profitable online marketing. For best results, have your SEO done by a professional.