In short, search engine optimization (SEO) is important because it employs keywords and other strategies to make a website consumable for search engines.
When search engines can find you on the Internet, then human beings will find you as well.
Utilizing SEO means more business and increased profitability.
This is the reason that education programs such as Microsoft Certifications educate people on how to manipulate search engines.
How does SEO work?
People wishing to retrieve information on the Internet open a search engine, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Then, they type in keywords for what they want to find.
When they hit “Search,” those search engines begin their four functions:
1 . Crawl through the Web via links for Web pages or files to retrieve interconnected documents.
2 . Index and store all of the documents they find related to the search. There are billions, so without SEO, your website would end up so far down on the search engine’s list that no one will see it.
3 . Decide which documents are most relevant to the search and have the highest ranking.SEO strategies, such as keywords (the terms searchers to locate the information they are seeking), number of other sites linking to yours and obvious website hierarchy and clear text links are a few examples of SEO techniques that will cause the crawlers to pick your website to display. It is a popularity contest and you cannot be popular without implementing search engine optimization.
4 . Report the results to the searcher. These results, of course, are listed according to rank and relevance, two things difficult to achieve without SEO.
Without SEO, a website cannot be relevant or achieve popularity and therefore won’t be seen by customers.
Today, almost anyone can create a website, but in order to create a website that will attract traffic, you should have an understanding of why SEO is important and how to implement SEO on your website.
If you are interested in learning more about SEO and information technology certification programs, click here.
SEO provides your website, which is a reflection of your business, with two things: visibility and trustworthiness.
SEO creates popularity which means more people see your site.
SEO also increases relevancy. This, coupled with ranking, tells consumers you are a trusted business and worthy of their time and, hopefully, money.
Sources
St. Edward’s University (2012)
SEOmoz (2012)
About Erik Emanuelli
I agree; it’s not enough to have an awesome website, you need to optimize it too, so it will have a good position in SERP. Erik explained it well.
Beth recently posted..College Grants for Art Students
The more Organic Traffic we have, the better !
Thanks for the comment, Beth !
Now that you’ve mentioned organic traffic, a question raised into my mind: what’s the best proportion a website could have? (direct, referring, organic)
Beth recently posted..College Grants For Single Parents
Beth,
few weeks ago I made the same question to Bill Slawski, of “SEObytheSEA.com”.
I asked the average percentage of organic visits compared to other sources of traffic, like social, referral and direct visits.
“What is the average organic traffic that a good quality site should have? (respecting all the SEO Google rules).”
This is Bill Slawski’s answer :
“I think that different sites, with different audiences will vary in what might be the optimum types of traffic that arrives at their pages.
A site, for example, that has a really well known brand, such as ESPN or Sears should get a lot of direct traffic. That doesn’t mean that they should ignore attracting referral traffic or organic search traffic, but the percentage of traffic is going to be different.
A site that consistently publishes content that is picked up upon and linked to by others is going to have a very different footprint when it comes to the diversity of types of traffic to its pages, but that shouldn’t be an influence in how its pages are ranked, much as the direct traffic for the sites I mentioned above shouldn’t either.”
So I guess it is pretty impossible to tell the best proportion, without specification of type of site, with analysis of audience.
I should stay with my first reply to you :
the more organic traffic, the better !
Do you agree with me, Beth?
You have to keep number 2 in mind: without SEO, your site may be found on the deeper pages of the search results. Of course, you wouldn’t want that. What you should do is to create good content that’s well optimized (not over-optimized; that’s something else), and make sure that the people would love it as much as the search engine crawlers would.
Firstly for the reader, secondly for search engines.
Thanks for your comment, Gerald !
Awesome insights Erik. SEO is the only way to create steady, sustainable traffic to your site. Social media can give you a great burst here and there but you can’t always depend on it. Definitely important to have, but social media is a fundamental you can’t afford to ignore.
Kalen recently posted..Google’s Bipolar. Don’t Take it Personally
I agree with you, Kalen.
Of course SEO is important, but Social Media is a growing trend, and all companies should use it.
Erik,
SEO is definitely huge. Where else can you get free visitors anxious to read what you wrote? The reports that the spyder or bot makes are extremely important to the blogger.
David Sneen recently posted..How to Get a Lifetime’s Worth of Raises in 4 Years
Hi David.
I should add that the most important thing to consider is that the visitors that come to your page is because they have searched for the keyowords that match your content, so this is really a focused targeted traffic !
SEO is of course nothing new and has been around forever but I still have not got really deep into it. I am still skimming the surface and I keep seeing these articles and I start to feel guilty that I have not worked harder.
Hello Sara,
the same happens to me.
The more you know and learn about SEO, the more you want to digg into.
I keep “discovering” things and methods and rules about SEO, that I I wonder why I have not studied before these things?
Then I tell myself that there is time for everything.
SEO is an everyday learning. Thanks for this wonderful information.
What a simple way to explain this all!! I wish there was such a simple way to implement an effective SEO strategy, too.
Let’s see the bright side of working in SEO,you never get bored!The practises change all the time, and google keeps changing the algorithms, so.. Every day is a chance to learn something new and if you really think about it, will never get out of work
We can concentrate and focus on writing high quality content, and may be forget SEO.
Don’t you think so, Anne?
It is quite hard to follow all the Google updates and guidelines…
Not exactly,Erik. What i think is that Google will keep releasing updates and there will be always things to do. But quality content and let’s say white hat practices will always be calculated by the spiders,SERPs etc.