Benefits of SEO

You might ask me: why we need SEO? You might ask me: why we need SEO? What benefits of SEO can get for our website? Well, most users are tend to search in major search engines like Google and Yahoo. If you are targeting a specific target (i.e, tech savvy readers),  being listed in these search engines is the best way to reach out to your targeted audience / readers. Whether your website provides information, services, or products, search engines are a primary method of navigation for almost all Internet users. Without SEO, your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into search engine’s databases. But, by applying SEO to your website,  when your targeted audience hit search queries (the words that users type into the search box which contain terms and phrases best suited to your site), your website will be easily found by your audience.

Competition in ranking in certain keywords varies; depends on how many competitors do you need to beat. Investing enough time, effort, and some money (when you do PPC or pay-per-click; but that is another topic!) in SEO really gave back exceptional rate of return. SEO can help boost rankings so that content that has been found will be placed where searchers will more readily see it.

Currently, there are three leading international search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing (Formerly MSN) Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same SEO expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and AllTheWeb all use the Yahoo database. Ranking in each search engine is really a big help in reaching out you targeted audience and bringing them to your website. These are the reasons why applying SEO in our website is very important.

Search Engine and SEO Defined

For those who just new to SEO, here is a good start for you. So first, let’s discuss what a search engine is, and how it is working.

Search engines (like Google, Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Ask, etc) are online tools used to search for informations on the internet or World Wide Web (www). The search engine results may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.

All search engines works in four phases: 1) crawling, wherein search engines run automated programs, called “bots” or “spiders”, that use the hyperlink structure of the web to “crawl” the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web; 2) indexing, the process of collecting and storing data for fast and accurate information retrieval;  3) data querying; wherein search engines retrieves crawled and indexed data based on given search parameter; and 4) search result processing; wherein search engines show the sorted data based on search query.

Search engines are run by some sort of program called algorithm; and each search engine has its own algorithm. No one really knows how exactly each search engines differ from one another. That’s why each search engines show different results on same search query. And here’s when we will apply SEO. So, what is SEO all about?

SEO (short term for search engine optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website, making it rank or  “searchable” in search engines in a certain keyword or set of keywords. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

There are two phases in SEO: 1) On-Page Optimization, wherein you start preparing your website for optimization which is starting with website analysis and keyword research; and 2) Off-Page Optimization, wherein you start to “link building” your targeted keyword in different ways (which I will elaborate more on my next posts).

There are lots of factors to consider for your website to rank in your targeted keywords. The keywords used for website, the quality of website contents, and also the quality and quantity of backlinks are just some of the factors in ranking in most search engines. From time to time, each search engines change or update their algorithm; that’s why SEO is a really challenging: learning SEO is endless; as long as the search engines are continue to exist and evolve, we website owners need to go with the flow / trend.

Learning SEO is easy. Once you get along on how to do the basics of SEO, both on on-page and off-page factors; for sure, you can make website rank on your targeted keywords and gain natural traffics from search engines.