Are you trying to learn more about SEO and how it works?

Well, if you are, then you have come to the right place. If you own a website, then you are probably quite familiar with SEO. And you should, considering how important SEO is for the productivity of your website.

SEO is going to help you tremendously when it comes to gaining organic traffic on your website. But how does SEO do this?

And what can you do to make sure that you have used SEO to its maximum potential?

Well, if you do not know the answers to those questions, you do not have to worry. I am going to tell you everything you need to know when it simply comes to SEO.

That way, you will be able to truly understand what SEO is and how it can help you improve your website.

What is SEO?

If you want a better understanding of what SEO is, then you need to know about the basics. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

This process will help you when it comes to increasing the visibility of your site. That way, you will be able to have more people visiting your website based on relevant searches.

That way, your website will more likely appear on the first page of a search result. This will help your website gain more attention, attracting more people to your website.

Of course, this will be very beneficial to you, especially if you are trying to gain more customers for your business.

However, the purpose of SEO is not to blindly improve the quantity of your website traffic. SEO will also help you improve the quality of your website traffic, allowing you to have more relevant visitors to your website.

This will help you increase exposure to your brand through search engine results.

So, you might think that SEO focuses more on search engines. However, that is not the case at all. SEO is a process that pays as much attention to people as much as it pays attention to search engines. But what does this mean?

To simplify, SEO is all about understanding what people commonly search online.

It is about figuring out what kind of answers that people are seeking when they are typing words into the search box. This means that SEO focuses also on the words that people are using when they are searching for something on the internet.

It also focuses on the type of content that people are looking for when they are searching whatever it is that they are searching for, their search intent. SEO is about answering those questions.

By knowing what people are searching for, you will be able to optimize the content of your website. That way, you will be able to connect to the exact people that are searching for the solutions that you have on your website.

And those are the basics that you need to know about SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

Now that you know what it is, let’s talk about how SEO works.

You can get incredible benefits from SEO by learning more about the crawl budget and other aspects of this process that you need to know. However, you also need to know about how SEO works fundamentally.

What you might not know about search engines is the fact that they use bots to be able to crawl through some pages on the web. Search engines such as Bing and Google all use these bots.

These crawl bots will go from website to website to collect information about the pages on the site. After that, these bots will put those pages in an index.

Search engines also have algorithms that will analyze the pages that are already in the index. These algorithms will then rank the pages based on various factors and signals.

They will eventually determine the order in which the pages will appear in the search results for a certain search on the search engine.

There are so many factors that will determine the search ranking of web pages. These factors are mainly divided into six categories. Each category has its importance when it comes to SEO.

Some examples of factors that can improve content optimization are keyword research and content quality. Other examples include architecture factors which are how mobile-friendly your website is and its “crawl ability”.

The algorithms that search engines use have the purpose of displaying relevant pages. That way, these search engines will be able to have an effective and efficient searching experience.

By optimizing your website through its contents and many other factors, you will be able to improve the rank of your pages in search results.

And that is how SEO works in a nutshell.

Why is SEO Important?

So, now you know more about SEO and how it works.

But why do you need SEO if you own a website?

Why is SEO very important for your website?

Well, you probably have a slight clue as to why SEO is important. But we are going to convince you even further about the importance of SEO for your website.

You probably know several ways to generate traffic to your website. These ways include using online platforms such as social media or using paid advertising.

Of course, these things can help you gain more traffic to your website. However, you have to know that the majority of online website traffic is significantly driven by search engines.

Based on research in the United States, only 2.8% of people click paid advertisements which will lead them to a certain web page.

SEO increases traffic opportunity by 20 times that percentage. This includes the traffic opportunity on both desktop and mobile.

If you set up the SEO correctly, it will also be able to continue paying dividends over time. Some even say that SEO is one of the few online marketing channels that can do that.

If you improve your website by providing content that can earn the highest rank using the right keywords, your traffic will improve tremendously. This will be very beneficial to you compared to using advertising since you need to continuously have funding for using advertisements.

Sure, search engines are getting smarter and smarter every day. However, they still need the help of site optimization to provide the most relevant searches on the search results.

If you can optimize your site using SEO, you will be able to give better information to every search engine. This allows your content to be indexed properly, making your web page appear in higher ranks in the search results.

SEO and its Importance in Marketing

The general importance of SEO is perfectly explained above.

However, what is the importance of SEO when it comes to marketing?

Well, that is exactly what we are going to answer in this next section of the article.

SEO is a very important part of digital marketing. How so?

Well, as you probably know, people make trillions of internet searches every year. These searches usually have commercial intentions such as finding more information about a product or a service.

That is why these searches become the primary source when it comes to digital traffic. A lot of brands usually rely on searches to improve their organic traffic.

To make it simple, SEO will help you improve your visibility and rank you higher in search results. That way, you will have a higher rank than your competition to appear on the first page of a search result. This will end up improving your sales if you are trying to sell a product or a service.

SEO and Organic Search Results

Another thing that you need to know about SEO is the term “organic search results” or “organic traffic”. I have mentioned those terms in some of the explanations above. However, do you know what they truly mean?

Organic search results are search results that you will be able to earn using effective SEO. If you use an ad to improve your traffic, the search result of your web page will be clearly labeled.

However, with effective SEO, your website will be able to appear in the higher ranks of search results without being labeled anything at all.

So, the question is, how can you identify organic search results?

You are probably quite familiar with search engine results pages. These pages are full of advertising and organic result formats ever since search engines have evolved.

For example, some search engine results pages have snippets or answer boxes on them. New features are also surfacing in search engine results pages to improve the overall user search experience.

One of the most important things that you need to remember is that search engines can make money from advertising. They want people to keep searching using its engine as well as keeping people on the search engine results pages.

You also need to know that some features on the search engine results pages can be influenced by SEO.

For example, you might be familiar with snippets that display answers inside a box with their related questions that you can find in Google. These snippets can be influenced by SEO. So, you can see how important SEO is for your traffic.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO

Other important terms that you need to know when it comes to SEO are white hat and black hat SEO.

White hat SEO is SEO techniques, practices, and strategies that follow the search engine rule. This kind of SEO focuses more on providing value to people who are searching for something through search engines.

Black hat SEO is the complete opposite of white hat SEO. This kind of SEO uses strategies and techniques that are meant to fool or spam the search engines.

Although black hat SEO can improve your traffic, it will usually work only for a while. This is because your website is at a very high risk to be penalized by using black hat SEO. The search engines might even de-index your website, which means that your site will be completely removed from search results based on ethical misconduct.

Websites that get penalized can be very bad for business. Some of these websites have even bankrupted their businesses. That is why you need to be very careful when it comes to SEO, especially if you are hiring an SEO agency or expert to optimize the content on your website.

Do I Need to Hire an SEO Agency for My Website?

Now that you know how important SEO is for your website, you might be considering hiring an SEO agency or an SEO professional.

This is another important thing that you need to know about SEO. Well, there are several factors that you need to consider before you think about hiring an SEO agency to help you improve your website.

First of all, you need to consider your bandwidth and how complex your website is. If you have a complex website that might need the help of an expert, then you have to consider hiring an SEO agency. However, you should always be careful when you are trying to hire an SEO agency.

You need to make sure that the SEO agency that you are trying to hire practices white hat SEO. That way, they will not violate any ethical rules while working on your website. This is very important since you do not want your website to be penalized by search engines.

If you have a simple website and a willingness to learn, then you might want to consider performing basic SEO yourself. All you need to do is to learn how to improve your website through SEO and you are all set.

Either way, you will be able to increase the traffic on your website and improve your business with the help of SEO. And that is everything you need to know about SEO and how it works.