When you think of it, it is kind of hard to follow the history of SEO, but its term and concept was first used back in the early ’90s. As the internet began its amazing expansion and evolution, new and more search engines started to appear. Parallel to this technology development, the need for being first in search results became extremely important. Eventually, web developers and advertisers understood how they could adapt and create strategies and tools to reach and stay in the top positions of result pages, giving birth to what we know as SEO, today.
Understanding SEO Basics
SEO has become one of the most important marketing tools for businesses in general. Not a single business, project, or idea that wishes to grow online could reach its success unless they apply SEO campaigns effectively. But, what is SEO exactly?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and in simple words, it is defined as the process that allows websites to become visible to internet users. The SEO theory states that the higher ranked your webpage is on the search results page, the more visitors and eventually potential customers it will receive. So, you can describe or think of SEO as a set of rules, tasks, strategies, and tools converging together, to naturally or organically gain better or the top positions in the SERP, or search engine result page.
When applied correctly an SEO strategy will ensure that your webpage appears on the top positions of the SERP, but it doesn’t end there. You can also take advantage of SEO strategies to make your webpage more user-friendly, faster and easier to navigate while increasing its quality.
You can control and also increase your webpage traffic, engage with your visitors and strengthen up your relationship with them. SEO can also be used as a powerful tool to promote and strengthen your brand awareness. Therefore, it is essential for a business to understand what is involved and converging in SEO to make the best of it, and ensure their success.
The Composition of SEO Structure
As mentioned above, SEO is a set of rules, tasks, steps, strategies, and tools converging all together to boost the possibilities of hitting a first place or top position in the SERP. However, to achieve this, it is essential to understand how SEO is composed. IT experts, web developers, programmers, and engineers, usually refer to SEO in two faces, on-page, and off-page SEO. Others even name a third and previous step as technical SEO.
System engineers refer to the Technical SEO as the very first step. It is basically, everything that has to do with the site’s structure and architecture programming. The developers and programmers job here is to make it easier for a search engine’s algorithms or crawlers to find, read and interpret your site.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO or on-site SEO is everything involving your webpage content and other elements found on your site. At this moment, you are in control of your site’s content, and you intend to create enough and clear signals to search engines algorithms so they can interpret the meaning of your content accurately.
You will be using essential tools like the composition and narrative’s structure, titles, headings, texts, keywords, images, videos, infographics, menus, internal links and everything at your disposal to send correct and clear info to the web crawlers. You need to show that your site and its content is not only high quality but also extremely relevant to the user. This way the search engines will rank higher and better your content and site quality.
Off-Page SEO
The final step is the off-page SEO. This one is often, mistakenly underestimated by many startups and businesses. However, lately, its importance has grown considerably for developers and search engines. Some of the off-page SEO strategies will be considered part of 2019-2020 strongest SEO trends. So, with no doubt, it is a step to pay attention to and look out for.
Off-page SEO techniques and strategies are mainly based on backlink building. When a user arrives at your site via backlink from another trusted site, your site will rank higher on the search engine result page, especially if the link is coming from a well-known and respected site.
There are many ways you can take advantage of off-page SEO to accurately promote your site. Some of the most popular and effective means of exploiting backlinking is by creating engaging, trustworthy and popular blogs or multimedia material that is attractive and shareable to users.
The number of high-quality backlinks to your site will positively affect in a big way the positioning of your site on the SERP. Backlinks are highly rated as a signal of trust for search engines since they are telling the crawlers that others consider your webpage valuable and trustworthy.
SEO Importance in the Business World
Search engine optimization has changed the way advertisers, and businesses see and promote their brand and webpages. Internet users trust Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines to provide answers and solutions to their queries and needs. It is stated that most search engine users will click on the top five sites suggested by the engine, and nearly 33% of the users click on the first ranking page.
According to Google, at least 34% of users who conducted a local search on their computer visited a store within a day, and at least 50% of the consumers did it after searching on their smartphones. Therefore, not only having an online presence but also hitting the top positions in the search engine result page, is a rule of thumb for any business or site that wishes to succeed.
It is true that pay ads, like Google Adwords or any other sort of pay-per-click Ad, will take the first positions on the SERP. Search engine marketing or SEM is a great way to boost your business awareness, presence, conversions, and incomes. SEM or search engine marketing refers to all the paid marketing strategies like social media ads, Google shopping ads, and everything that the industry has to offer.
Through SEM you can easily segment your target audience and reach more and better potential customers. Nonetheless, SEM is just a part of a complete and effective, high-quality SEO campaign. One should complement and boost the other.
SEO is a crucial element to ensure the online success of your site, but it is more than just that. SEO rules and policies have also provided an accurate commercial guideline, to improve your webpages user experience and usability. Search engines complex algorithms tend to change drastically. Besides, not all of their rules are always entirely clear. Therefore, it is crucial to take control of your site through an accurate SEO continuously, so your user’s experience and usability are always at its best.
If you can read and manage your SEO metrics correctly, you will have a clear map to set up the best strategy and approach to your users and potential customers. You will be selecting those users that are more prone to convert eventually. That will give you leverage over your competitors, no matter how much money they invest in SEM or any paid online marketing strategy. With an optimized and well-tailored SEO campaign, web search engines will rank your site higher.
Setting Up Your SEO Business Goals
Before designing and launching your SEO strategies, it is important to know and set up accurately your goals. Remember that SEO is composed of a vast number of rules, tasks, and steps. Depending on the goal you are aiming at, you may vary between tools, strategies, and plans.
On the other hand, if you are not entirely aware of how to set up correctly your SEO strategies, regarding the different objectives and goals your business has set, it will be hard to succeed. Consider your area of expertise, how the market and industry react and look for ways to provide your customers with easy access to data, info, and solutions to related issues and needs on the subject.
If you can focus your SEO goals and strategies accurately, you will be in control of your webpage and your potential customers. From there it will be easier to optimize your site.
Increase Web Awareness
Having the coolest and most amazing web page is not enough. You need to help your potential customers to find you. With SEO you can quickly increase the visibility of your site. Accurate SEO can boost your sites rankings and therefore its position on the SERP, making it more visible. It is an excellent strategy for brand awareness.
Respected Expert
The more respected and trustworthy your site and brand become, the higher your webpage will rank on the search engine result pages. You can focus your SEO on becoming an authority in a particular field or area. As you offer original and better content, users and potential customers will trust you more, and you will rank higher.
Website Experience
Learning how to read your SEO metrics and results is a great way of monitoring how your users and visitors perceive your webpage. The user experience is critical when it comes to good ratings. The webpage loading time should be fast enough to keep your users interested and entertained.
A good site experience and a friendly user interface will also boost your web traffic, which is one of the most popular and pursued SEO goals for business web pages. The more visible and better rankings your site gets, the higher the traffic will be.
Increase Your ROI
If you can arrange your SEO steps and basics to converge together harmoniously, you will be able to reach the ultimate goal of any business, which is increasing their ROI, or return on investment. If you are able to make your site more visible, reach more and better target audiences, strengthen your relationship with them, keep them longer on your site, making it more appealing and user friendly, while driving more people to it and increasing your respect and trust, with no doubt your business will grow and its income with it.
SEO Evolution
The search engine optimization has become without notice, a vital tool in the daily lives of people all over the world. Thanks to SEO, internet users don’t have to waste precious hours of their valuable time, searching for the information or answers to their needs. On the other hand, SEO also avoids that businesses and webpages manipulate the results, so the suggestions you get will always be the best ones.
Nonetheless, just as human and consumer behavior, SEO is continually evolving and its rules are changing. Google and the other search engines are always looking for ways to improve their performance, and in the last decade, they have shown how volatile and fast-changing their policies can be. What most of the search engines consider a priority, setting a lot of value to certain aspects, such as keywords, relevancy or backlinking, and in a couple of weeks from now, these might not be as important and valuable as before.
It doesn’t matter how successful your business and site are. You can’t let down your guard. On the one hand, your competitors will always be out there trying to outrank you, and on the other, SEO is always changing, and if you are not on top of the latest SEO industry trends, your brand and site will lose relevance.
How is SEO changing in 2019?
Knowing what is coming ahead in the SEO industry is vital to stay in the top positions. According to analytic experts, a few years ago you simply set your site with the proper content structure including menus, buttons, bullets, internal and external links. Good keywords in the content, header, title, sub-header, introductory paragraph, and a conclusion paragraph, a word count between 1,140-1,285, a loading webpage time of 1.16 seconds on the desktop and 1.10 seconds on mobile, and your site will have huge chances of hitting the first positions.
However, even though some of these aspects are still important for crawlers, they are not enough to reach a high rank anymore. After analyzing 2018 and how the first 2019 trimester SEO world moved, at Impressions Agency, we can expect what will still be considered essential to be included in your SEO 2019 strategy, if you wish to hit the top positions of your sites field.
Stay on Top with SEO
To hit the first positions in the SERP this 2019 and the upcoming year, it is essential to follow what are and will still be the top SEO trends.
Original Quality Content
This has been for a long time a significant aspect in SEO ranking, and it will still be. The more attractive, relevant, engaging and entertaining your webpage content is, the higher it will rank.
Mobile-First Indexing
Google has rolled the anticipated Mobile First Index, shifting its ranking algorithm to primarily focus on mobile-friendliness as the first indexing criteria. Statistics show that in 2018, 52.2% of worldwide online traffic was generated through mobile phones. In fact, according to Google data, 70% of mobile searchers who’ve made a purchase, click on their smartphones to call directly from the search results to connect with a business. Now, this doesn’t mean desktops will no longer be factored, but mobile is increasingly becoming essential.
Data Security
Data security and ownership issues have become a significant subject in the SEO industry. International guidelines as the General Data Protection Regulation Policy, are trying to set the rules of the game, but in the meantime, ensuring data protection to your users is essential, and search engines are looking into it.
Even though it is mostly associated with virtual currency such as Bitcoins, interesting options like the use of blockchain to create a secure and trustworthy record of the data transaction is becoming popular. It is expected that the use of blockchain will have a huge impact on SEO.
Conclusion
In conclusion, SEO is more than just an amazing and essential marketing tool, but a set of different strategies that allows you to take control of your website, to make it more appealing, useful and vital for your users.
It is also a fast, volatile, changing complex organism that requires time, hard work, dedication, and constant updating, to keep it accurate and effective. However, once you can handle your SEO campaigns, you will ensure the success of your business, project or webpage. If you wish to know more about SEO amazing world, contact Impressions Agency today.