What is SEO?
SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimisation”. It is an internet marketing strategy which uses search engines and affects the process through which it increases a web page’s visibility on the results of the search engine. Meaning that a website or a web page will appear higher on the search results of a search engine (like Google or Yahoo).
To achieve this, the content of the web page or website will be edited, in order to make it appear more frequently. It might target different kinds of searches, for example local, or academic searches, news or video searches, etc. This will gain more visitors to the webpage or website, and these visitors will later be converted into customers. For example, we could have an imaginary corporation that builds starships. The corporation wishes to promote its products online, so it creates a webpage with an online shop for the starships. However, the webpage of the corporation is not high enough on the Google results. The corporation then edits the webpage using SEO methods. It will now appear higher on the results. Therefore, people will visit it and these people might start buying starships, thereby converting these visitors into customers.
Some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Strategies
The basic techniques to optimise search engines are the following: the creation or improvement of the content in such a way that it is user-friendly and easily accessible by search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Creating keywords in the title and the rest of the web page’s characteristics as well as its data (ALT, rel, title, etc.). Creating keywords in links on other websites/pages, which will in turn lead back to the website in question and keywords that appear inside the text of the web page or website.
Of paramount importance is the relevancy of the web page/website’s title, description, keywords and content. This relevancy will bring the webpage higher in search results. The title plays an important role for the web pages. Search engines pay special attention to h1 and h2 tags. Finally, the web page must make extensive use of keywords. Keywords are vital for the web page to appear in search results. If on the web page there is more than one page, then keywords must appear in all of them. For example, in our imaginary starship corporation, the people performing SEO on the websites must be sure to include the keyword “starship” or “hyperdrive” in the title and the text in the web page. They must also include the aforementioned keywords in all the pages of the website. Otherwise, it will not show up high on the search results. There is however the danger that the words will appear too frequently. This is called flooding and in such a case, search engines will flag these words as spam (keyword spam). Google for example accepts a 7% frequency of the same words. Bearing all this in mind, we can see that it is important for a corporation to use SEO strategies to optimize its website, thus attracting more visitors. These visitors can then be converted to customers.
