SEO 101 – What and Why

June 2, 2019June 7, 2019 Geekopedia 0 Comment Engine, google, online, Organic, Page Rank, SEO, SERP, Traffic, Web

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a practice or process of boosting both the quantity and quality of website traffic. Moreover, it also increases brand exposure through organic search engine results.

In layman’s term, SEO is mainly about search engines and how they determine which websites get displayed on the first few pages of results. Part of the process is studying and considering the people’s behavior of searching online, i.e., how frequent they search, what kind of answers they seek, what words they use when searching, and what type of content they want to read. Once the answers to these questions are known, connecting to the people who search online for solutions a particular business offers becomes easier.

One vital side of SEO is knowing very well what the audience’s intentions are. On the other side is the concept needed for the search engine crawlers to find and understand these intentions. An effective SEO covers both sides, something a San Francisco SEO agency like Jimmy Huh is expert at.

The Basics of Search Engine

This digital age has provided a streamlined solution to every process or activity. For the information addicts, they got search engines as accurate answer machines. What these search engines do is they receive billions of contents and determine which contents out of these billions bear the answers to users’ queries after thorough evaluation and consideration of thousands of factors.

How do search engines do it?

Search engines are especially designed to be smart enough to discover and catalogue all available content on the internet, e.g. PDFs, images, web pages, videos, and a lot more) via a process called “indexing and crawling”. Once the first phase is gone through, all the fetched qualified contents get reordered and ranked.

What are “organic” search results?

When a content appears in the top results with the help of an effective SEO that did not involve any expense or paid advertising, then it is organic.

Back in the days, organic search results were easy to identify because the advertisements were labeled clearly as such and the remaining results appeared like blue links. But on the average, search engines like Google change their algorithm 500 times in a year. This consistently changing mechanism has made it hard to spot organic results through time.

Nowadays, SERPS or search engine results pages are already a summation of both dynamic organic and advertising results formats which include featured snippets or answer boxes, image carousels, and a lot more. New SERP features continue to be introduced in light of what people at the present are looking for.

For instance, if you search for “San Francisco weather”, you will come across a weather forecast for the city in the search engine results pages instead of a link to a site that might contain that forecast. And, if you search for “SEO San Francisco”, you will most likely be given a number of “local pack” result made up of San Francisco SEO service providers. It has gotten that convenient.

How do search engines make money?
Advertisements are considered the lifeblood of search engines because the latter make money from it. Every search engine’s goal is to provide a better set of answers to searchers’ queries within the search engine results pages (SERPS) and along with that is making sure that these searches get satisfied of the provided answers and will want to come back for more.

Some features of search engine results pages on Google are organic and can be impacted by SEO. These features include related questions (the “People Also Ask” boxes) and snippets (a promoted organic result that shows an answer inside a box). However, not all are easily influenced by SEO even if they did not involve paid advertising. More often than not, these features fetch data from proprietary data sources like Web MD, IMDb, and Wikipedia.

Why is SEO important?

Even if social media, paid advertising, and other online grounds can boost a website’s traffic, the majority of online traffic is actually an effect of how search engines work.

Organic search results comprise of more digital real estate. They usually appear more credible to tech savvy users. Because of their tested reliability and authority, they entice more searches and earn more clicks than paid advertisements. The accounted US searches’ data alone showed that only around 3% of users checked out paid advertisements out of interests. The rest relied on search engines like Google for accurate answers.

A bad SEO can cripple a business’s chance to earn, nonetheless. Hence, proper setup is necessary for SEO investment to be worthy. This includes good quality contents that need to be produced consistently.

Is SEO DIY-able?

SEO is a broad process that can put your business at risk if done wrong. More often than not, you will need to hire an SEO professional, agency, or consultant if you do not have enough time or willingness to learn about its complexity.

With all the required discussions, it is more convenient to seek help from an SEO service provider near you. For instance, if you are residing anywhere near San Francisco, it would be best if you hire a San Francisco SEO to do the job. Do note, however, that not all SEO service providers are the same. They usually vary in terms of quality. That said, it is necessary to know how to spot a good SEO company where only good techniques are used and carried out for the good of your website.

Black Hat, White Hat, what do they mean?

In the world of SEO, there are concepts called Black hat and White hat. Black Hat SEO refers to the strategies and techniques that intend to fool or spam search engines. White HAT SEO on the other hand, comprises of good SEO techniques, strategies, and practices that conform to the search engine rule. Although black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at risk of being penalized or removed from search engine results. Make sure your hired SEO service provider carries out only white hat SEO. Otherwise, you will not want the ethical implications your website will be subject for.