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What is SEO?
The full form of SEO is search engine optimization. It is a branch of digital marketing. If you have an online business, you may have heard about SEO one way or another. You might have caught yourself wondering; what is SEO? What role does it play in the success of an online business? To answer these questions, whenever you search for anything on a search engine, like google, the results that show up are courtesy to SEO.
The websites appearing on the first page optimized their sites according to Google’s requirements. These pages are called SERPs, short for ‘Search Engine Result Pages’. As a result, google ranked them among the top pages. These results are called organic results.
In other words, SEO is the practice of changing and modifying a site’s structure and content so that it is discovered among the top rankings for the keyword searched.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
What is SEO and what is SEM? You might’ve heard SEO and SEM used interchangeably. In truth, SEM is an umbrella term for SEO and PPC. SEM stands for search engine marketing and PPC stands for pay per click. Pay per click means that a site has paid for its advertising. This advertisement appears as sponsored on the top page of a search engine like google. It is opposite to organic result.
How does SEO work?
To answer, “What is SEO?”, we need to know how it works. The process of search engine optimization involves 3 steps:
1. Crawling
The search engine has bots called spiders or crawlers that “crawl” aka explore a site. They follow links from one page to another until they have crawled the whole website. They check the content and judge if it follows the criteria of the search engine.
2. Indexing
In the next step, the search engine saves the pages that fulfil its criteria in its database. All the pages that appear after searching are those that the search engine indexed.
3. Ranking
Finally, the search engine ranks according to an algorithm. Ranking is also affected by user responses to a website.
Types of SEO
According to the type of service provided, SEO can be divided into following types:
1. On-page SEO
What is SEO without on-page SEO. It is the most common and most used type of SEO. It involves the improvement of a site page to make it easily visible to target audience. The important part of it is the proper usage of keywords. Keyword research thus plays an important role.
The keywords are naturally incorporated into the following:
- Title tag: The HTML page title that can appear in SERPs
- Meta description: The HTML page summary that can appear in SERPs
- H1 tag: The HTML element that contains the on-page title
- Subheading tags: HTML tags that contain subheadings (H2s, H3s, etc.)
- Alt text: HTML image descriptions
- URL slug: The web address
2. Off-page SEO
It is the optimization of a website but as the name suggests- outside of the website itself. It involves the publicity of the brand or product by utilizing different means.
Those means could be:
- Reaching out to influencers
- Guest posting
- Creating backlinks
- Social media marketing
- Local SEO
3. Technical SEO
A website may encounter technical problems which lower its ranking in the search engine, like:
- Website speed
- Broken backlinks
- Errors in site architecture
- Differences of site functionality in different devices
These problems are tackled in Technical SEO and have great impact on site visibility.
Importance of SEO
You’re close! Understanding the importance of SEO will help you find your answer to ” What is SEO?”.
- It helps drive organic traffic to your website.
- It has a great return on investment ratio.
- It allows featuring in other SERP features like “People also ask”, etc.
- Helps get ahead of your competitors.
SEO services
The query of “What is SEO?” is often accompanied by “How do I get SEO services?” A search engine optimizer or an SEO expert provides SEO services to help optimize your website. It is a fast-growing industry due to its increased demand. The global SEO industry is estimated to reach $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO further has many specializations which leaves many tasks to be performed for a certain period. There are many online tools that can help a beginner get started. Fiverr also offers many freelancing SEO service providers for those who wish to optimize their site. You can visit our website https://amdigitalmarketingagency.com/ to get a consultation on SEO services.
Conclusion
SEO is a great service for promoting your business, enhancing your site visibility and inducing more organic traffic. There are no rules inscribed in stone to follow for SEO as algorithms keep changing. It is a process that employs different techniques and can be easily learned through constant practice. So? How did you like our answer to “What is SEO?”.