reliablesoft.net

Home / SEO Articles / What Is Search Engine Optimization And Why Is It Important

by 57 Comments

What Is Search Engine Optimization And Why Is It Important

what is seo

Search engine optimization is nowadays more important than ever and it is necessary for every webmaster to understand the true meaning of SEO as well as the potential it creates for every business.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO in short, is a set of rules that can be followed by website (or blog) owners to optimize their websites for search engines and thus improve their search engine rankings.

In addition, it is a great way to increase the quality of their web sites by making them user- friendly, faster and easier to navigate.

THE COMPLETE SEO GUIDE A step-by-step guide on how to increase your traffic in 60 days or less. Learn how to practically build a successful website or blog.The ONLY SEO Guide you will ever need to read!

SEO can also be considered as a framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages and a set of controls.

Why is SEO important?

In today’s competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems.

If you have a web site, blog or online store, SEO can help your business grow and meet the business objectives.

Search engine optimization is essential because:

  • The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS), so to take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site or customers to your online store you need to in the top positions.
  • SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a web site.
  • Users trust search engines and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching, increases the web site’s trust.
  • SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your web site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or other social media channels.
  • SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. Web sites with more than one author can benefit from SEO in a direct and indirect way. Their direct benefit is increase in search engine traffic and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site.
  • SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two web sites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized web site is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

An introduction to SEO for beginners

For beginners to SEO the above definition may sound complicated,  in simpler terms Search Engine Optimization is a way to improve your website so that it will appear closer to the top positions in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engines.

When you perform a search on Google (or any other search engine) the order by which the returning results are displayed, is based on complex algorithms.

These algorithms take a number of factors into account to decide which web page should be shown in the first place, second place etc.

Optimizing your web site for search engines will give you an advantage over non-optimized sites and you increase your chances to rank higher.

What are the main stages of the Search Engine Optimization process?

As I mentioned above, SEO is not a static process but rather a framework with rules and processes. For simplicity though SEO can be broken down into 2 main stages:

On-site SEO: What rules to apply on your site to make it search engine friendly

and

Off-site SEO: How to promote your website or blog so that it can rank better in search results.

On-site SEO

In my search engine optimization tips for beginners article I have explained with examples the 15 most important rules for on-site SEO.

These are simple tweaks you can apply to your web site and increase your search engine visibility. If followed correctly, these 15 SEO tips will also improve the usability and credibility of your website or blog.

In addition to the above guidelines, the structure of a web site is also very important for SEO purposes.

In my article: the importance of web site structure for an SEO optimized web site you can read about the essential components of an optimised web site.  Which pages should not be missing from your web site, what is a high quality site and why the navigation and URL structure is vital for good SEO?

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU:
Running a WordPress website? Then download this how to guide and learn how to optimize your website like a Pro.

If you seriously take into account these 2 factors i.e. web site structure and the seo tips, then that’s all you need to do to help search engines trust your web site.

There is no need to spend more time than needed with on-site SEO neither you should over optimize your website or blog because it can sometimes (under certain conditions) generate the opposite results.

Off-site SEO

Besides the changes you can do to your web site (on-site SEO) so that it ranks higher in the SERPs, the other way to improve your website’s ranking position is by using off-site SEO techniques.

Off-site SEO is generally known as link building but I prefer to use the term web site promotion since a proper way to promote a website involves much more methods and techniques than building links.

In general, search engines are trying to find the most important pages of the web and show those first when a user enters a search query.

One of the factors to determine the position a web page will appear in the results is the number of incoming links.

Incoming links are a signal of trust and depending from where the links are coming, they can greatly affect your ranking position (either positively if the links are coming from well-known and trusted sites or negatively if they are paid links, article directories, link farms etc.).

What can you do to get more links?

That’s a very good question and I am sure that if you search the Internet for that phrase you will get hundreds of different answers.

In my opinion, and this is what I will try to explain in this article, you should forget about building links and concentrate on creating good quality content for your web site.

Good content will get you natural links which in turn will give you good rankings and traffic.

If you try to buy links or get them the easy way (read this: Guest posting for links), you may have a temporary success and then see your web site disappearing from the top pages after the next Google update.

What is the difference of SEO and Internet marketing?

Some people often ask me “Is SEO the same as Internet Marketing?” The simplest answer I can give is that SEO is one of the tools available in your Internet Marketing arsenal.

It is not Internet Marketing as such but it can be part of your overall Internet Marketing campaign which normally includes other things like social media promotion, content strategy etc.

Good content is still the most important success factor with or without SEO

Before closing this introduction to search engine optimization you must have very clear in your mind that SEO cannot help you if you don’t have good content.

In other words if you try to SEO a website with not very good content your chances of succeeding (in the long term) are minimum.

On the other hand, a website with good content can do well with or without SEO. SEO will just give the web site an extra boost.

SEO is a must for every web property

To sum it up, Search engine optimization or SEO is a way to optimize your website so that search engines will understand it better and give you higher rankings.

It is important since a good SEO approach can drive more traffic to your website, blog or on-line store and gain more customers, make sales and fulfil your business purpose.

+1
Share
Share
Email
Shares 598
LIKE WHAT YOU’VE READ? Sign up for my blog updates and never miss a post. I’ll send you a FREE eBook on the Most Effective Methods to Drive Traffic to Your Website in 2018, as a thank-you.

100 % privacy. I hate spam as much as you do!

The Complete SEO Course

This is the only SEO Course you'll ever need to read. Learn Step-by-Step how to increase your traffic and find out how to practically build a successful website or blog.

Get SEO Course Now
Alex Chris
About the author

Digital Marketing Consultant and author. Alex has more than 15 years of experience in SEO and Internet Marketing. You can read more of his articles at Digital Marketing Pro and also connect with him on Twitter and Google+.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Alex, I don’t understand all the jargon (on-site,off-site) SEO and I have a very simple question: Will SEO bring me more traffic? 🙂

    Reply

    • George Hi

      Certainly will bring you more traffic and will also create more happy users!

      Thanks for passing by
      Alex.

      Reply

    • Hey George,
      SEO when done appropriately can not only bring traffic but it also brings potential customers that are actually looking for your business related services and products. Thus it’s very important for an SEO to understand the target audiences and nature of business.

      Reply

  3. Really enjoyed reading this article. Just one question.

    When you say that a site should have good content, what exactly is ‘good content’?

    Thanks

    Reply

    • Simply put, ‘good content’ is content that has been properly researched for accuracy, speaks about topics that are popular (trending), and utilizes keywords that your target audience is using to find you. It must be easy to read, yet informative for your target audience and make you appear to be a leader in whatever industry you operate in. Ultimately, it should be content that people also want to share!

      Reply

  5. Very well said, Alex! And when you are looking for an SEO company to work with, it is imperative that you focus not just the cost but the quality of the service you will receive and the potential return of investment.

    Reply

  6. Very well said Alex.. Yes in today competitive world everyone try to find the way to earn more profit in business. SEO makes it very much easy to gain the online customers directly to your business. Quality SEO services can take company to different level than expectation.

    Reply

  10. Hello, Alex!
    Great article with in-depth knowledge about SEO and why it is important for websites especially websites that related with online businesses. It is a great guide for SEO beginners. Helped me a lot to understand the each and every point about SEO. SEO helps businesses to find new customers and promote their brand on top pages of search engines that make easy for users to find your brand. SEO helps to boost your revenue by increasing the number of traffic to your website and by increasing sales.
    Thank you for sharing the great post Alex and keep doing a good job.

    Reply

  13. I’m new to SEO and The SEO Key book spells it out so that a high school student can learn it. I haven’t applied any of the tools yet- I just finished the book. But I feel confident in my ability to implement the tools now because of this book.

    Reply

  14. Thanks for the blog it is nice source of information for SEOs and Webmasters. SEO is very important to get online business. For increasing the ranking in Search Engines and for online visibility every business should go with the quality SEO services. Hope you will continue to share interesting SEO blogs with us.

    Reply

  15. Alex,

    Thank you for the insightful and well-written article. As being my initial exposure to this topic, I found it easy to understand and feel I now have a solid starting point from where I can begin implementing SEO strategies with my own site.

    I noticed that your page appears at #1 on the Google search results for “why is SEO important”–a pretty compelling testimonial. Would you be willing (and I would personally find it very helpful) to point out a small handful of places on this site that you revised to improve its SEO (e.g. off-site and on-site)?

    Thanks again,
    Rob

    Reply

    • Hi Rob
      SEO Improvement is a non-stop task. Besides publishing new content on a regular basis, one of the things every SEO should do is to go back and improve existing content and find new link opportunities.

      Thanks
      Alex

      Reply

  16. Hello Alex, Thank you for this article. I have a hard time grasping all these technicalities and terminologies around the wide web. I am an early retiree here in our country (PH) and the reason why I decided such because I want to stay home and take care of my old mother and while doing that I need to have an online job. On my search I tried applying tutorial ESL but failed, I have blogs at blogger for fun which I created few years ago just update it lately, I searched about how to become VA, and one online job want to have an experienced SEO marketer. I am a manager by profession on my regular job but dot com era enticed me and I am simply awed by people who shared ideas freely like you. Thank you for your free eBook.

    Reply

  17. Nice. Thanks for sharing. SEO is very important for any kind of business. For visibility, brand awareness and higher ranking in search engines. Keep sharing your blog with more SEO updates.

    Reply

  18. How lucky I am! I’m searching new ideas containing article like this cause I’m getting failed to get a few traffic for my blog although I work every day on it and it has been going for six months. I think this article will help me to achieve my goal.

    Thanks
    Sadhan Pal

    Reply

  23. Your blog is indeed a comprehensive take on SEO. It is pretty obvious that SEO has become a survival tactic for any website to beat its competitors and stay at the top on search engine results.

    Reply

  25. Targeted traffic to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other channel of marketing.
    Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other types of marketing and promotion.

    Reply

  26. Hi Alex,
    Great Post ,
    SEO is an investment that will surely give positive result after months of hardwork. It helps to get more organic and genuine traffic to the website and increases page rank.

    Reply

  27. Very good information alex,

    This will help me with my website since I’ve been struggling to grasp the basics of search engine optimization. Maybe some of these key factors is what is needed for me to get my website ranked.

    Reply

  28. Hi Alex,
    Thank you for sharing wonderful information on search engine optimization.

    I am struggling with few doubts if you can help me to clear then it will be very helpful.

    1. My domain authority is dancing sometimes it crossing 15 and sometimes it backs to 10, I dont know why this happend.

    2. I am still not using https for my blog, Should I switch to https?

    Thank you

    Reply

  29. SEO is very helpful. As an on line marketer, I would know. It’s very much of a hassle at first but when you get it all figured out after a long time of practice, it is more beneficial than the traditional way of marketing. The return of investment is so high!

    Reply

  32. I got good knowledge on SEO, the importance of quality contents and guest blogging. It is a great guide for SEO beginners. Both on-page and off-page techniques help website to increase traffic and get better position in the search engine.

    Reply

  33. Hi Alex, do you have official info (meaning Google’s info) about the percentage of people clicking on SEO results rather on SEM (ads).
    I understand many people simply does not prefer to click on ads (although these ads appear on top results), and they just start viewing (and clicking) considering the first 5 or 6 SEO result only. Thanks!

    Reply

    • Hi Guillermo

      There are no “official stats” but many studies have shown that aprx 65% of clicks goes to the first 5 organic results.

      Thanks
      Alex

      Reply

  34. Hi Alex,

    A very helpful and informative post. I have followed a couple of on-page and off-page techniques to optimize my blog and certainly, the efforts have been paid off by getting a place in SERP for the desired keywords. SEO helps!

    Reply

  35. Very impressive post. All these tips are handy for me. Im going to follow these strategies with my business blog in 2018. Thanks a lot Alex for creating this kind of beneficial contents.

    Reply

  36. Thank you, Alex! Your article really helped me a lot. I understand more about SEO, how it works, and how it is important on digital marketing.

    Reply

  37. Impressive information in the article about how important SEO is to today’s world of digital marketing. It’s a great start for beginners & for experts to look back and have an easy look through. How do you personally think about SEO in today’s era of technology & digital marketing?

    Reply

  39. Thanks, Alex. For this comprehensive SEO article. 🙂 Sometimes I wonder what will be the future of the search engines because then maybe 100s billion keywords will be there and 10 times more websites owners will be competing for the same keyword! Thanks for sharing…

    Reply

  40. Thanks for the wonderful information on SEO importance. SEO is really important factor for any website. We should properly optimize websites for better indexing and website rankings. That is only way to achieve our SEO goals.

    Reply

  41. A set of worthy information. One thing here touched me that — a quality content always a big factor for a site’s performance in SERPs. Thanks for your amazing work!!!

    Reply

  43. Very well explained SEO and its importance. informative and concise.
    Really in today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever.

    Thanks for posting this wonderful post.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Alex Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

598 Shares
+1
Tweet
Share
Share
Email

LEARN SEO FROM THE PROS

Enter your email below to get access to my exclusive SEO tips.

I’ll send you a FREE eBook as a thank-you.

100 % privacy. I hate spam as much as you do!