What is SEO? [2021]

This post covers some of the basics of SEO. We will look into the term SEO by asking few general questions.

What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization". SEO is a process or technique to optimize your web pages in a fashion so that it shows up into search engine queries possibly in top 10 results. Of course, it is not necessary to get into the first top 10 results, however, if it is not in the top 10 or 20 results then your web page is virtually invisible to search engine users. You must have observed this when your search term in Google has returned few million results.

The SEO process generally results in quality traffic to your website. It is important to improve the quality of traffic with SEO resulting in the right Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) for your product or services. The SERP is any result that search engines like Google display in response to a user's search term or query.

The SEO process is a definite way to increase website traffic which can further be converted into leads and then used for generating sales for your product or services. 

Why do we require SEO?

From a strictly business point of view, optimizing your website for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing is required to get your website or digital products noticed on the internet.

There are billions of websites and the SEO process helps in ranking your website at the top of the search results. Hence, to grow your business, it is essential to perform SEO on web pages. With more search engine optimized pages, more people will able to locate your business, i.e. more organic traffic. The organic traffic is any traffic coming to your website and it is not paid for.

Hence SEO forms an essential part of Search Engine Marketing or Internet marketing, business strategies used for marketing your product or services online.

Fig: Statista - Statistic: Worldwide desktop market share of leading search engines from January 2010 to February 2021

Search is employed by almost every popular site. It is implemented by all kinds of blogs, portals, and news sites, and others. As said above, SEO forms an essential part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Google search engine has more than 92 percent of search market share, according to Statista. So now you know which search engine you should target for SEO.

What are the types of SEO?

There are two kinds of SEO based on how they use different techniques to optimize web pages for search engines.

1.  White Hat SEO – These are SEOs who use legitimate techniques as per search engine policies or guidelines.

2. Black Hat SEO – These are SEOs who trick search engines to show up their optimized web pages by violating search engine policies or guidelines.

What else do you think about SEO? You are welcome to drop your comments to add value to this post.

PC: Pixabay