We all know about web designing, a major industry created by the invention of internet. SEO or search engine optimization turns out to be its cousin industry. Since I came across this term many times, especially from my younger blogger friends, I thought of delving deeper and finding out more about it. Whereas many webmasters try to make it a mystery for beginners, but it’s not that difficult to understand, at least theoretically.
It’s basically a set of techniques to make your website fare better in search engines in order to attract more visitors. To make it even simpler, let’s dissect the term ‘search engine optimization’ into two: search engine and optimization.
You are well aware of search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. but actually it is lot more complex inside. Search Engine always crawls, indexes, and then serves the desired result. Super computer runs millions of bots and spiders on a crawl. These bots and spiders read all the information regarding your search and deliver the result to the computer. This result is then indexed and categorized. And finally, the search engine serves you the list of most relevant result pages.
Now moving on to optimization, it is the work done to make search engines crawl, index, and prefer your website when someone is searching something relevant to your website. Basic steps involve maintaining clean code, good content and some other technical requirements to make it search engine friendly.
Since SEO is directly related to internet search and all of us use search engines, it indirectly affects us through the results and web pages that are thrown up before us. Did you know that 70% of the US internet search market is with Google? And that about 75% of people don’t go beyond the first page of Google Search.
Generally there are two types of SEO, onsite and offsite.
Onsite SEO is generally referred as the things which you do directly on your website which will affect your page ranking. If you have good on-site SEO then there is a chance for your website to get good rank by the search engine. Some of the onsite SEO steps include adding keywords to the headers, internal linking, optimizing the content with keywords, doing proper formatting, etc.
Offsite SEO is done away from your website’s directory. Main purpose behind offsite SEO is to create awareness about your website over the internet. It can be in terms of getting references from other reputed websites, social media presence, etc. all of which happen away from your own website’s server.
