What is SEO? Part one

SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation) falls into two categories and in these articles, we will be discussing the basic concepts,

• On–page SEO (the work we do on the pages of our site and how we write our content)
• Off-page SEO (The work we do elsewhere to promote our site i.e. backlinks, Social Media marketing etc)

Why SEO?

But first, we will ask why we need to do this at all, then later parts we will talk about on-page and off-page aspects of SEO.

So what is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the art and science of setting up pages, features and websites, so users can find them more easily when they type a query into a search engine.

Since Google enjoys 86.86% of the Global market share of search engines from 2010-2020. according to Statista. We will mainly concentrate our time working on keeping Google happy.

Why should you care?

• Well the best reason to care, is that about 85% of search engine users never go past the first page of search results. Given that the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) top results are made up of paid adverts and organic search results, no more than about 10, This means that very few users go past the top ten results! Therefore if your page or site doesn’t rank very highly, you will be getting very little traffic coming from the search engines.
• If a page is properly optimized and links to other optimized pages, which together create an optimized site, the entire contents of that site will show up much more often on the SERPs, and therefore drive much more organic traffic to your site. This will generate more natural visitors to your site.
• Search engines have algorithmic programs called Spiders (Because they crawl the web) and find sites, pages and content to show when users type a query. The algorithms will assign a  site or page a relevance score, called a page rank (Named after Larry Page, the man who wrote the algorithm. And not for how well your page ranks!). The better the Page Rank the better your page or site will do in search results.
• And the best reason of all to care is that organic natural search results are cost-effective; you or your client can reduce significantly or eliminate, their paid search (SEM) costs!

Search Engine Result Pages

As Google has become more sophisticated over the years the Search Engine Results Pages have also gotten more complex. But that’s a subject for another time. The image below shows a quite simple results page.

You will notice that the page shows the PPC/Paid Search ads first, followed by the Organic search results, in this case, 10. Then there more paid search results at the bottom of the page. You can see from this that Google gives priority to some PPC paid ads! But research shows that approximately 90% of users still choose organic results over PPC, paid ads. So your page must rank as high as possible in the organic listings!

Conclusion

We have seen what it is we mean when we speak about SEO. And we have demonstrated many reasons why this should matter to you. We have explained how the Search Engines have programs called spiders because they crawl the web looking for and indexing content. And we have shown how the results pages are organized. Together with some statistics about users behaviour relating to, the SERPS. If you have any comments or questions about this material then please leave a comment or ask a question below!

Is it all clear so far? Or do you need further information?

Read part two of What is SEO