What is SEO and why is it important?

What is SEO and why is it important?

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, standing for the practice of increasing both quantity and quality of traffic to your website via organic search engine results.

Basically Google makes uses of an algorithm, a complex mathematical formula, to score every website as well as every search a person does in Google so as to decide the rankings of each website with relevant content that people are looking for. To better understand it, you can imagine the algorithm as a basketball game. The final score depends on how many 3-pointers (the quality of your site) you hit, how many 2-pointers (the number of sites link to you) are made, and how many free throws (how people trust you) you score. All you need to do is keeping trying to score as many as possible in the algorithm and exceeding your competitors.

You can affect your search engine ranking by having the highest score in terms of quality of your site, of having the highest score in terms of authority of your website, of having the highest score in terms of the most trusted store for that search that people are looking for. The good news is that there are more than just the three means of score to win the game, and every single mean stands for an opportunity for you to score and rank higher. Therefore optimizing your site for search results really means getting the highest score in the game as many of these points as you can.

Why is SEO important?

In today’s competitive market, SEO is more important than ever. Search engines serve millions of users per day searching for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. Search engine optimization is essential because:

• The majority of search engines users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS), so to take advantage of this and gain visitors to your web site or customers to your online store you need to in the top positions.
• SEO makes a web site trustworthy by ranking it high on search result list with the keywords that users are searching for.
• SEO is good for the social promotion of your web site. People who find your web site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or other social media channels.
• SEO is important for the smooth running of a big web site. A web site with multiple authors can get benefit from SEO directly and indirectly as well. The direct benefit refers to increasing search engine traffic and the indirect benefit is using a common framework for publishing content.
• SEO can put you ahead of the competition. If two web sites are selling the same thing, the search engine optimized web site is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.

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