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.
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.
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results.
PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages.
PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.
SEOs would agree that the following are all important Ranking factors…
• Keyword usage
• Site structure
• Site speed
• Time spent on site
• Number of inbound links
• Quality of inbound links
Advantages of SEO:
1. The Results are Low Cost (In Comparison to Adwords and PPC)
2. Definite Increase in Traffic
3. Better ROI (Return on Investment) Than Normal Ads