What is SEO And Why Is It Important
Introduction
Do you know most businesses still do not understand SEO and how important it is? So, if you are one of them, do not feel left out; read this entire piece of content attentively.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process/strategy put in place to ensure that a website gets the most visibility possible (traffic) from the search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc
Think of SEO as the marketing a brand or company may do via TV, radio, and other news outlets, except for the fact that it is done via search engines.
How SEO has evolved
Over the years, SEO has witnessed a very sharp increase in popularity as businesses see and understand its importance for their sustainability, sales and profits.
We may want to note briefly that the term search engine optimization was first used by the Webstep Marketing Agency in 1997. Although the term isn’t the creation of Google (the major search engine) or its peers, they have been somewhat forced to acknowledge the term and the practice.
When speaking about SEO, it will be very common to see even experts in the field solely focus on Google SEO, and this is so for a reason! Google has over 91% of the search engine market share, followed by Bing (3.19%), Yandex (1.52%), Yahoo (1.33%), Baidu (0.76%), and DuckDuckGo (0.64%).
Thus, every SEO strategy should focus more on Google without totally ignoring the other search engines.
To understand how much and why SEO changed and will constantly change, we need to understand the fact that Google and other search engines are constantly updating their algorithm to ensure that the best and most helpful/valuable content gets served to the users when they input any query in the search bar. Below are a few major updates that shook the SEO world:
On-Page vs Off-Page SEO
On-page SEO, also known as on-site refers to those aspects or factors and practices of optimization that we can control. This includes adjusting and modifying elements that are visible on your website such as the title or content globally and also the HTML codes.
Off-page SEO on the other hand has to do with all the efforts done from outside your website to improve rankings on the search engine result page (SERP). Off-page SEO mainly involves link-building, because as we saw earlier, backlinks are very important in SEO.
Understanding the concept of SEO and its importance is the first step to taking action and implementing it to drive traffic to any product or service and eventually make sales or raise awareness.
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