Search Engine Optimisation | An overview
As we all know, search is all about making the connection. The primary objective of any search engine is to help users find information, products, and services they are looking for online. The result should be delivered quickly and accurately.
- Search help customers to connect with all information they care about.
- Search help marketers to connect with all customers they care about.
Importance of Search Engine
A search engine plays a very important role in a typical website’s life in terms of marketing and generating traffic. On average, 4+ Billion searches are recorded every day. With no doubt, we can say that Google has a monopl=oly in the world of search engines since 90% of search over the web are done via Google. Some other well-known search engines include Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex, etc.
Search Engine acts as a hub for all the media. Typically 30 to 40 per cent of a website’s traffic comes from Google search. One thing about Google search traffic is that it delivers you seasonality as well as consistency, unlike the other ad senses where traffic becomes zero if you no longer pay for it.
According to SERP (Search Engine Results Page), search is divided into many categories. SERP is the page that a search engine returns after a user submit a search query. The search query can be Information/Knowledge-based, Location-based, How-to queries and rating based queries.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
As per searchengineland.com, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business. An SEO understands how the search engine works and helps to get the brand’s web properties on top of the search results. SEO helps us get free traffic to our website that may result in leads and sales.
Being on top of the search engine result page is very very important because 90% of the user do not go beyond the 1st given link. Top 3 results out of the given 10 grab 60% of the traffic. Meanwhile, not being on top will decrease the overall website’s traffic and especially those which are coming from Google.
A Search Engine Optimisation works on 3 main factors:- Crawling, Indexing and Ranking.
Search engines have bots to crawl over the WWW and get a copy of the website that it visits. A search engine like Google gets the information about the site through the sitemap data submitted by the website’s owner (Webmaster). This is called Crawling.
Now that search engines have all the information about the website, the search engine builds an index of all the sites. This index is similar to the index at the beginning of any book which shows chapters and their page numbers. This is called Indexing.
The Ranking is an algorithm that works depending on many factors. Since Google gets millions of search results every day, it returns the pages by their relevance to the search query. This is called the SERP rank of the page, where relevance is determined by 200+ factors.
OnPage SEO vs OffPage SEO
Optimising our website is called OnPage search engine optimisation. The OnPage SEO is mostly based on the factors that determine SERP rank.
These factors include :
(i) Relevance of the website to the query i.e, the word used in the search query must be present in the description of the webpage to gain traffic.
(ii) The content of the page should be majorly pictorial as it grabs attention easily and the keyword density should be maximum and unique.
(iii) The site should obey technical robustness as it should be free from coding errors and should take less time to load.
(iv) The design should be responsive and mobile-friendly to increase usability and productivity.
(v) It should be secure and provide ease of use and navigation.
OffPage search engine optimisation is an SEO technique that does not directly happen on your website. This works on the factors like link technicality, link building, social media marketing, etc.
Search Engine Optimisation Tools
Below is the list of some tools every SEO professional should know.