WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ?

Search engine optimization could be basically defined as the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. In easy terms it could be understood as the art of persuading a search engine, to recommend your content to the users to get the best result out of it. It’s like ad marketing through which we can get most of our audience engaged with us. SEO helps the search engine, to show the best result for the content user is asking for, but for that, you first have to show the search engine how worth is your content for the user. For that search engines should understand who you are and what content you offer to hit the target audience. SEO focuses on optimizing a website in order to get traffic from organic search results and the best part out of it is that when a user clicks on your website to visit your site you do not pay Google for a visit and that briefly describes
what is SEO used for?

WORKING OF SEO
Now for understanding something we should know how that works, so when someone searches something on a search engine it basically put the best result in front of the user to satisfy its users, they wanted to provide the best result of the content they got, search engines could be google, yahoo, Bing, etc. now for them to be the first in the race they provide the most helpful, relevant, and credible answer or solution. The search engine is basically a librarian which would provide its customers the best book to satisfy their customers the most with the book which is the same as the content in the case of search engines.

Now for example search engine suggested your website for some result because you put some terminologies related to that but the user didn’t find it useful, and it happened with so many users so automatically your website would be lowered in rank, as the screen time on your website is just for few seconds.

So the term terminologies play an important role in SEO we could also say it as keywords your website should contain some certain targeted keywords which are so specific to drive people towards your website. For example, if my website is about the car engines and I used the keyword car and a user searched for car brands so my website would be also available which has nothing to do with the users search so, the screen time on my website would be less and search engine would not show it often, so we have to keep some specific keywords in our website so that it would be differentiated from others.

Keywords should be kept in mind according to the target audience. Keeping in my mind about the specific content we also need to understand the user intent when someone searches on google they express their problem which is mostly incomplete or insufficient, so the first things search engine do is to understand the problem compile the words and give the most accurate and most helpful and useful content on the world wide web that reliably solves that problem? Google needs to understand the available solutions, their relative merits, and their appropriateness. And this is what SEO is practically about.

SEO is your means to present your content to Google in such a way that it is confident that your solution is the most helpful, the most trustworthy, and the most appropriate for its user. In short, convince Google to recommend your answer or solution.

GOOGLE ALGORITHM
SEO works according to Google’s algorithm, and due to the frequent changes in
Google’s algorithm, SEO also kept continually changing but first, we should understand Google’s algorithm, which is easy to understand it is simply a computer code that understands questions and evaluates the relative merit of the answer. Now the interesting fact about the Google algorithm is that we could aim to persuade the Google algorithm in such a way that our answer is best, most useful, and specific for the question that had been understood.

TECHNIQUES USED BY SEO
SEO uses some techniques to provide the search engines with the best result these techniques are on-page SEO, technical SEO, off-page SEO. Understanding them on-page SEO optimizes each web page to target a keyword and appeal to search engines and users. It refers to both the content and HTML source code of the page that could be optimized. On-page SEO has several benefits such as higher ranking, advanced crawl rate, improved local search, boosting organic traffic.

The second technique comes technical SEO which optimizes elements of a website that are not content-related – think the backend structure and architecture of the site. Strategies set out to improve site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexing, It is important because it allows the search engines to know about the high value of your website and could persuade search engines to rank your website higher. If your website is technically optimized it would show several characteristics as it would be fast, it would not have many dead links, it wouldn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content.

Now the last techniques which are off-page optimization basically help in building, the authority and reputation of your website which impacts your ranking within the search engine result pages it also has several benefits that are online branding, growth of reach, increase in referral, and social traffic, increases in domain authority, better search engine Ranking.

MORE ABOUT SEO
Search engine optimization is getting tougher all the time. Not because the techniques are any harder than they used to be (although in a sense, they are — after all, the tricks people used to employ don’t work as they did, but because it’s getting so much more competitive.

As more and more people learn about SEO, more and more of your competitors are doing a better and better job at SEO, so it gets harder and harder to compete for those top spots. There’s a lot to learn about generating traffic from search engines, and sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. There are page-optimization and link strategies and index submissions and directory submissions and electronic press releases and blogs and this and that — it goes on and on. Obviously, it’s important to create web pages that search engines will read and index, pages that you hope will rank well for important keywords. But if you’re going to build a website, you need to step back and figure out what purpose the site should serve and how it can accomplish that purpose.

EXAMPLE
For example we could learn it easily from amazon , Creating a useful site is the key. Even if your sole aim is to sell a product online, the more useful the site is to visitors (and, for that matter, the more user-friendly your site), the more successful it’s likely to be. Take Amazon.com, for instance. It certainly wasn’t the first online retailer of books and music, or any of the other products it offers. But one of Amazon’s real strengths is that it doesn’t just sell products; it’s a really useful site, in many ways: It provides tons of information about the products it sells. The information is useful even if you don’t buy from Amazon. You can save information for later. If you find a book you’re interested in but don’t want to buy right now, save it in your Wishlist and come back next month, next year, or five years from now.

You can read sample chapters, look at tables of contents, listen to snippets of music, and so on. You can read product reviews from both professional reviewers and consumers. Would Amazon be so successful if it just provided lists of the products it sells, instead of offering visitors a veritable cornucopia of useful stuff? Absolutely not. Having done a little consulting work for Amazon, I’ve spent some time looking at the site from an SEO perspective, and what interests me are the many ways in which Amazon drops keywords into their pages. As you discover elsewhere in this book, keywords on web pages are a huge part of SEO — and Amazon’s pages are scattered with keywords. Take a look at the books pages, for instance, and you’ll find the following: Product Descriptions: Manufacturers and sellers provide product
descriptions — laden with keywords if they know what they’re doing.

Editorial Reviews:
These are descriptions of the book by the publisher, stacked full of keywords related to the subject covered by the book. Customer Reviews: When someone reviews a book about, say, Search Engine Optimization, they tend to use words related to the subject, such as websites, SEO, programming, PHP, sitemaps, linkbait, and so on. Customer Discussions: Customers can actually engage in discussions with others, by commenting on reviews. When people talk about a product, they’re going to use keywords that are related to that product. Customer Questions and Answers: Amazon encourages shoppers to ask questions, and previous buyers to answer those questions. Both the questions and answers contain related keywords, of course. Bits and Pieces: A variety of other page components add keywords to the page, such as “What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?,” Frequently bought together,” “Customers who bought this item also bought,” “products related to this product,” and so on. In the past, Amazon has used components such as “popular highlights,” “statistically improbably phrases,” “capitalized phrases,” “tags customers associate with this product,” “books on related topics,” and so on… and I’m sure in the future such components will continue to appear in product pages. However, as I learned when consulting with Amazon, many of these features were added without SEO in mind. Amazon added most of these things to make the site useful — SEO was an afterthought. Reviews, for instance, certainly do add keywords to the page, but they also help buyers make a decision (and can dramatically increase conversion rates — that is, converting shoppers to buyers). So creating a useful site often serves two purposes: It generates traffic through non–search engine channels, and it helps your site rank well in search engines.

HOW COULD YOU MAKE YOUR WEBPAGE SUCCESSFUL
We could also make our web page successful by few rules. That’s not so complicated, really. Figure out how your site can be useful and then find as many ways as possible to let people know about it. You’ll use search engines, of course, but you should be using other methods, too. Remember, search engines are not the only way to get people to your site. In fact, many websites have succeeded without using search engines as their primary method of attracting visitors. Over the last quarter of a century, a number of popular ideas about what makes a successful website have been bandied around, and all are wrong to some degree.

Here are some of those dated secrets to successful websites:
Links: When the web began booming in 1994, it was all about links. You would hear in the press that the secret to a successful website was linking to other sites. Community: Then people started talking about community; yeah, that’s the ticket! The secret to a successful website was creating a community where people could meet and chat with each other.

Content: Then around 2000, people discovered that the secret was content. By putting more stuff, particularly textual information, on your site, you could be more successful.
Blogging: At some point, it was decided that the real secret was having a blog on your site.

CONCLUSION
There is so much about SEO which could cover several books but this was how it could be summed up in an easy way , So at last SEO is the best way to make your business website close to your business goals and build a good understanding with your website visitors and make your website more relevant , specific, and higher in ranking.

The author of this content is The Sikkim Today’s Intern Aadhya Sharma, she’s BA (Journalism and Mass communication) Student.