SEO - For Dummies

Although SEO is being talked about in today's Social World, still people do not have proper idea on what SEO is? and how it works? Do you not wonder how actually Search Engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc) show relevant results based on query you  have entered. I have written small article for people who wants to get a brief idea about SEO is and its importance in today’s digital life. Before we get started on this, let’s first know what SEO is and what SEO is not.

What Is SEO ?

Whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query. Did you ever wonder why some of these websites rank better than the others? Then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Search Engine Optimization means a technique that allows a site to get more traffic from search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). SEO is a part of Internet Marketing. SEO techniques helps search engines to find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query.

What SEO Is Not

Most of the people have misunderstanding that user has to register with Google to get their site listed in google by paying sum of money. But SEO is nothing to do with purchasing the number 1 sponsored link through Google and saying that you have a number 1 ranking on Google. Purchasing paid placements on search engines is nothing but Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and not SEO. Have you ever noticed first and last two web links on Google result page appear different than rest in the middle? It is because the first and last two web links are nothing but SEM results while links in middle section are nothing but result of SEO

      

Even though there are so many sites that has same information but SEO will not rank number 1 rank for your site name, because search engines are usually smart enough to award you that rank by default. Your site ranking depends on various factors and these factors are nothing but SEO. So let’s see how SEO works.

How SEO works

The first basic truth you need to know about SEO is that, search engines are not humans. Search engines are text-driven software’s. First search engines crawl the Web to see what is there. This task is performed by a piece of software called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot in case with Google). Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion) it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, so sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for a month or two.

Now let’s see what a crawler sees from your site. As already mentioned, crawlers are not humans so they do not see images, Flash movies, JavaScript, frames, password-protected pages and directories, so if you have tons of these stuff on your site, your site will not viewable, they will not be spidered, not indexed, not processed, etc. in a word they will be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right. So we need to provide proper meta tags and description with our site doing this, it will be easier for crawler to classify your pages correctly and for you to get higher rankings. Uses of meta tags and descriptions with proper keywords, provide a quick summary of the main content on the page. In some cases, this may come up as the page description on a search result.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string. There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links in sites, meta tags. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more important to known  is the fact that all major search engines like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep your site at the top, you also need to adapt the latest changes to your pages. You should also know that search engines also track user behaviour on your website and when users stay on your website, they consider it to be more relevant. The more visitors you get to your site, the more often it will come up in searches.

The last step in search engines activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

Why SEO is Important in today’s business world?

SEO is nothing but a process of making your website visible on the 1st few page of major search engines mainly Google. Through SEO, you have the opportunity to beat your competitors by securing one of the top ten positions on page 1!

You may ask, so what if my website doesn’t appear on the 1st page? The answer is simple, studies shows that around 90% search engine users don’t look beyond the first page of the search results. So let’s say your product is searched 100 times a day. If your site doesn’t appear on the first page, then you will instantly lose around 90% of potential customers. In today’s cyber world 90% of internet users use search engines to find products that they want to buy. So if you are not on the 1st page, then most of your potential buyers on the World Wide Web will never even about your existence. So if you don’t appear on the first page, then you will lose an unimaginable amount of money and your competitors will enjoy tremendous exposure on the internet. That is why SEO is very very very very very important for every business these days.

As a small business owner, you probably have a tiny marketing budget and want to do marketing for your product/services on to wider audience then he should go for SEO. The beauty of search engine optimization is, it’s completely free if you are doing it by your own. Beyond this, search engine optimization will provide your business with a long history of leads without any recurring costs. For example, if you optimize your site effectively, visitors can find you years and years. If you actually spend money on advertising the same message in newspaper, magazine ads and radio commercials it would all been out of print or in the trash by same day or time.

In the end i would like to say Search Engine Optimization is not rocket science. Search engine algorithms change regularly, so the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. SEO requires a long-term outlook and commitment. SEO isn’t about instant gratification. Results often take months to see. As you can see… SEO is not that hard BUT it is absolutely critical to your success on the World Wide Web. You need to make sure that you create a powerful and viable SEO strategy for your website and reap the benefits of your hard work and efforts in the long run. Ultimately, you should consult with a professional search engine optimization service provider to make the most of your plans. We at Systems Plus can help you do that!

About Author:

Manish Chandak is social media enthusiast and works as business analysts with Systems Plus. He in free time reads and write on various technologies and process around social media, analysis and testing. He can be contacted at: manish.c@spluspl.com