What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023? Unless you work in the world of online marketing, you probably haven’t heard of SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is a field of marketing dedicated to improving the quality and quantity of traffic to websites through organic search engine results.
It involves a set of rules for optimizing your website to increase the search engine ranking of your website, and thereby increase the number of visitors that find and click on your website via a search engine results page.
What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?
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Why Is SEO Important?
The fact of the matter is that search engines are the most used digital tool in relation to the internet – the vast majority of online experiences begin with a search.
In the competitive online market of today, SEO is more important than it ever was. SEO gives you the opportunity to harness the power of search engines and get free targeted traffic to your website from them.
This is the main reason why SEO is vital to the success of any online business, and even offline businesses too. Good SEO practices are vital if you want to be able to stand against your competitors.
The ranking of your website on search results pages is an indicator of success. More than 70% of search engine users are more likely to click on the top 5 websites on the search results page than any of the others, and more than a third will click on the first.
This may be because of the fact that users trust the ability of search engines to find websites of relevance, so being present in the top results for the keywords the user has searched for increases the credibility of your website.
What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?
The Many Benefits of SEO:
- There are two main goals of SEO, the first of which is to understand what people are searching for online so that you can create high quality content that the user is looking for.
- The second goal is to aid you in creating a website with content that can be found, indexed and understood by search engines.
- A side effect of following good SEO practices is that you’re able to improve the quality of your website and make it easier to navigate, faster and more user-friendly.
- Websites that are user-friendly instill trust in potential customers, thereby increasing conversion rates.
- SEO also plays an important role in the smooth running of large websites.
- Sites with multiple authors can benefit from SEO both directly, from an increase in organic traffic, and indirectly, from having a common framework to use when creating content for the site.
How Search Engines Work
To understand why SEO is so valuable, it helps to have an idea of how search engines work.
In order for your website to show up in search results, its pages must first be crawled and indexed by the search engine crawlers, or spiders as they are sometimes known, that scour the internet looking for new web content.
Each search engine has its own crawlers, and the pages they discover are added to the search engine’s index. The search engine index is essentially just that – a record of all the pages that it has crawled.
Each query that you input into a search bar causes the search engine to sift through its index and identify pages related to your query, and then rank them in order of relevance.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing rely on algorithms, also known as search engine ranking factors.
These algorithms take into account a number of rules in order to determine the relevance of different pages, and thereby how high they will rank in the results.
What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?
The Main Stages Of Search Engine Optimization
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Rather than being a static process, SEO is more of a framework with rules and processes. These can be broken down into three core categories: Technical SEO, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
- Technical SEO relates to crawling and indexing, and helps you to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website without any problems.
- On-page SEO relates to page content and optimization. This involves the rules that you should apply on your site and digital content, in order to make it search engine friendly.
- Off-page SEO relates to website promotion, and refers to the ways that you can promote your website or blog to make it rank higher in search results.
1. Technical SEO
This is the first stage in the SEO process, and has nothing to do with the actual content of a website or the website promotion methods.
It relates to the settings that need to be configured to make it easier for crawlers to index your site.
If you get technical SEO right, you may not have to deal with it again. If, on the other hand, you have problems with crawling and indexing, it will have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.
2. On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the second stage, and involves the content and related elements that are found on a page.
The primary focus of this stage is to provide crawlers with sufficient signals to understand the meaning and context of your content.
You have to bear in mind that search engine crawlers do not read web pages in the same way that a human being might, so they are looking for indicators as to what the page is all about.
This is the stage where you will deal with things such as:
- SEO keywords
- Website structure
- Title optimizations
- Headings
- Internal links
- Structured data markup
- And image SEO amongst other things
These features will send the right signals to the crawlers so that your pages can be correctly indexed.
By following good on-page SEO principles, you can not only improve the ranking of your web pages in search results but also improve its usability and credibility.
3. Off-Page SEO
The third stage of the process is off-page SEO, which is another way to improve your website’s ranking. Off-site SEO is more commonly known as link building, and it involves website promotion.
The reason why link building is so important is that one of the algorithmic factors that determine the position of a webpage in the results is the number of incoming links, also known as backlinks.
Backlinks are essentially an indicator of trust and, depending on the source, they can have a profound impact on your ranking position.
If these links come from well known and trusted sites, this will have a positive affect on your ranking. Paid links from article directories or link farms can be identified and will have a negative impact on your ranking.
Summary Of The Benefits Of SEO
What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?
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Good SEO can be a major driver of revenue for your business, as it can put you ahead of the competition in search engine ranking positions.
It’s not only an important tool for helping you to bring more customers to your website, it can also improve the overall customer experience by making your site easier to navigate and more user-friendly.
If you’re intimidated by the task of implementing good SEO practices for your business though, you’re not alone. SEO is a complex, multi-stage process and requires professional expertise.
Thankfully for you, dash- is here to help. We bring together teams of SEO experts, content creators and web developers to ensure that you have a professional site that will put you ahead of your competitors.
If you are interested in a free consultation and quote, contact us today.
What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?
Check our coming articles to learn more about:
“SEO trends 2023 / 2023 Buzzwords / SEO trends 2022 / Future of SEO in 2022 / Local seo 2023 / What is SEO And Why Does it Matter in 2023?”
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References:
- CNBC Business: https://www.cnbc.com/business/
- Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/subscriptions
- Bloomberg Businessweek: https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/