Many businesses and brands know that they need SEO for their digital assets. Consumers live in a digital world, and the majority of the buyers search online before making a purchase. Businesses that haven’t leveraged SEO are already left behind. They are missing out on the opportunity of adding great value to their brand and business.

Search engine optimization is the key tool for business websites as well as other interactive websites. Optimization of a website is essential to maintain the level over the search engines. But what is SEO? How it’s done? How do you optimize web content?

In this post, we will be answering the web’s most asked question – what is SEO and why it is important?

Let’s get started

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimization is the process of getting traffic from natural, editorial, organic, or un-paid search results on search engines. In other words, it is the practice of optimizing web content to be discovered through search engines. The benefits of SEO are apparent – passive, free traffic to your website, every month.

Search engine optimization involves making specific changes to your website content and design that makes your site more appealing to search engines. This is a practice done in hopes that Google, among other search engines, will display your website on top of the search engine results page.

While SEO can get complex considering the factors that influence your ranking, the fundamentals aren’t that difficult to understand. Search engines like Google only want to provide its users with the best service. Thus, its only aim is to deliver high-quality results that are significant to what the searchers are looking for.

In order to accomplish this, search engines will browse and scan different sites to understand what the website is all about. This helps them in delivering results that are more appropriate to users who are searching for a specific keyword(s) or topic(s). Moreover, a search engine will examine the websites to define how easy it is to read and navigate, rewarding user-friendly with higher rankings on search engine results page (SERP).      

By creating more effective and engaging SEO-focused content, you can boost your odds of bringing more traffic to your website.

What are the factors that affect SEO?

While Google will never tell you how it ranks the sites, there are certain factors that influence the SERP rankings. And the primary one is content marketing.

You may have heard it many a time – content is king. Content is useful in helping your brand making connections with site visitors, in addition to attracting the search engines as well.

The higher the quality of the content, the higher your website will be ranked on the search engine results page. Moreover, the more engaging the content is, the more will be your visitor traffic.

Apart from content marketing, on-page and off-page optimization also play a vital role in driving more traffic to your website while ranking it higher on the search engine results page.    

By Kar

Dr. Kar works in the interface of digital transformation and data science. Professionally a professor in one of the top B-Schools of Asia and an alumni of XLRI, he has extensive experience in teaching, training, consultancy and research in reputed institutes. He is a regular contributor of Business Fundas and a frequent author in research platforms. He is widely cited as a researcher. Note: The articles authored in this blog are his personal views and does not reflect that of his affiliations.