Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Explained

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Explained

DEFINITIONS OF SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important arm of E-commerce. It can be defined as the process of increasing a website's ranking through unpaid measures like building up relevant keywords. This process is focused on free and organic traffic. The industry is worth $65 billion as of May 11th, 2016 (Source: SearchEngineLand). A more official definition of SEO is given by Rand Fishkin: "the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of the traffic that you earn through the organic results in search engines."

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SEARCH ENGINES
For Yahoo! And Bing, on-page keyword factors are of primary importance, while for Google links are relatively more important. Furthermore, sites and domains are like wine (the older, the better) for Google; while Yahoo! generally has no expressed preference towards sites and domains with tradition (i.e. older ones). Thus you might need more time till your site gets mature to be admitted to the top in Google, than in Yahoo!.

KEY SERP COMPONENTS
Whenever you ask Google any question, the page that returns with the answers is SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
SERP has three important elements: SERP URL, SERP Title and SERP Description

1. SERP URL: This is the web address where the page stays on the web. Search engines give importance to it because the URLs shown in SERP may contain the phrases that you have searched for.
2. SERP Page Title: These are the titles, typically blue in color. This is highly a function of copy-writing.
3. SERP Description: This is 2-3 short description lines that are displayed below the title. If the searcher finds the title matching with what he is looking for, he will continue to explore the description to be sure that this is the page he is looking for.

⇒ Please help to make this topic even more informative and share any additional know-how on SEO below. Thanks!

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		1 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	Explanation of Search Engine Optimization WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quantity (and quality) of traffic to a webpage or an entire website of users of a web search engine. It aims to increase the unpaid results (also known as natural or organic results) rather than purchasing paid placements. SEO can target various kinds of searching, like text, image, video, academic, news, and industry-specific searches. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION APPROACHES - Optimizing a website may involve editing its content, adding content, modifying HTML and HTML coding to increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove any barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. - Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

		1 Liem Nguyen Strategy Consultant, Canada
	Elements of a Website Audit for SEO Purposes A SEO site audit is defined as a full analysis of all the factors that affect a website's visibility in search engines. It is a starting point to build a SEO and content strategy which will help your website rank higher. Each element of a site audit can be optimized. These SEO-elements typically include: CONTENT: Content is considered king in SEO. If you don't have interesting, original, relevant and readable content, visitors won't be interested in your site. Also, duplicating content may cause your site being banned. HYPERLINKS OF OTHER PAGES: Hyperlinks connect pages of independent websites to one another. They are references to external pieces of content. By inserting hyperlinks, search engines understand the correlations between subjects and this helps rank your page against relevant keywords. It is therefore imperative to build a good strategy before inserting hyperlinks to target the most relevant piece of content. PAGE RESPONSE TIME: This is the average time taken for your web page to load. It indicates the speed of a page. High page response time helps rank your pages higher in the search engines. CRASHED LINKS: These are hyperlinks that to not propel the user to another external or internal web page. These links corrupt site traffic which has a negative impact on your ranking. RECOGNISED URL CHECK: This happens when multiple hyperlink's URL point the same webpage. In these situations, it is more relevant to use URL recognition tags, such as graphical tags (image on a marker that can be read by a mobile camera). SITE MAP EXISTENCE: Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about pages that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. SITE CRAWLING: This is the process used by search engines to analyze your pages for relevant content and rank this content intelligently. Once a site map is submitted, search engines bots will start crawling your pages. It is therefore important to make sure that all your pages are being crawled and fix any crawling errors that may occur. URL NOT ALLOWED BY GOOGLE: It is very important to check whether site links are banned on Google, Yahoo, Bingo and other search engines. If any search engine has blocked the URL of a website that is connected to your hyperlink, this will negatively impact your ranking. TITLE TAGS AND META DESCRIPTIONS: These are bits of HTML code in the header of a web page and help search engines understand the content of a page. It is therefore important to show your keywords in these elements to rank for them. SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE (SERP): It is important to know the position your pages rank for a specific search. This is the starting point to track your progress. After passing a site audit, the Digital Strategist will have a more thorough understanding of the level of engagement for a website. He should then be able to build a roadmap that will detail which elements of the website should be improved, and which should be discarded. ⇒ Who can help me complete this list of important elements of a website audit ? Did I miss any? Sources: Peerl Preprints, (2019) "SEO: A unique approach to enhance the site rank by implementing an efficient keywords scheme", 2019, Mar, pp. 13-15