SEO: Easy Guides for Dummies

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the activity in an attempt to optimize content to increase its potential in getting into the search engine’s top ranking. If you need your website to be visited by more audience, getting to know SEO is the right decision.

Search Engines and SEO

Search engines are the system that Search and find the pages people are looking for through their system. Many views it as this big librarian that get the book his customers are looking for—in this case, the pages.

Search engines have their own system that would show the best-related results with the keywords you are looking for. For instance, if you look for rose, then the Search Engines would instantly link the word rose with every rose on the internet and put it on their Search Engines Results Page (SERPs).

SEO Explained

Just as the name suggests, SEO is how you optimize the content on your website to get acknowledged by the desired search engines. After all, the goal of every search engine is one that is to show the most relevant results to their users.

How you optimize your content itself depends on what search engine you are trying to put your work into. YouTube algorithm is different from Google or Bing algorithm, and that says that you can’t really treat different engines the same.

SEO and Business

SEO matters for your business. Even more so when your business depends on customers online. Of course, social media is an important aspect for your marketing, but if you want your customer to find you on the internet, SEO is equally important.

With SEO your content will be more visible on the internet and the traffic that visit your page will be beneficial to attract them to be potential customers. SEO will also increase the chance of people who look for your brands come to the right place at the right time.

SEO Writing vs. Content Marketing

SEO writing means writing content that is optimized for being discovered. Writing SEO means that you create content that has potential words or phrases that your intended audience will type in the search engine. On the other hand, if you are writing content for your business strategy, that is more of a content marketing. In this, you cook content that will answer your customers’ questions and queries. You put content that would best relate to audience as your potential customers.

SEO Tools

In ranking results in their SERPs, search engines depend on many things, including the quality, the page speed, and also its relevance and usability. These things can be valued by tools to make sure your content is up to the standard SEO. Many websites have offered plagiarism check and page speed for free. If you want to upgrade it though, you can always subscribe for premium use.

Optimizing Our Content for Google

If you create content in written works and put them on the internet, then Google might be your biggest bet to make audience flock to your website since most people use Google as a search engine.

Search engine, especially Google has a system that sorts out the most relevant pages to show in their SERPs. Their algorithm is by far the most reliable system to satisfy users’ needs of information. How do they do it? How do we get around to meet its expectations?

Crawlability

Just like other search engines, imagine the internet as this big library with Google as its librarian. There are billions of books in its building and trillions of pages for that matter. You as a user have some keywords for the book you are looking for, but you don’t know the book. As a librarian, Google will find your words inside your book, link it to any similar words and display all of the pages of the books you might be looking for. This process of linking one site to another is called crawling and use a computer program called a spider to do it.

With that in mind, you could increase our ranking by putting links in your content. The bigger the website you are referring to, the bigger the chance your page would be recognized by Google.

Mobile Friendly

Since 2018, Google has changed its priority in indexing to mobile. This is caused by the increase in mobile search for the past years. Thus, making your content is easy to read in the mobile view will benefit you greatly.

Search Intent

At first, search engines only depend on the keywords being typed in their search, but over time, Google has introduced the different method for them showing the results of their users’ inquiries.

Instead of randomly throwing their users articles with the relevant keywords, Google read the intent behind the keywords presented. For example, if you look for how to cook in a rice cooker, the first link, probably the featured snippets, would show you a how-to article about it. However, if you type only a rice cooker, what comes out will be a potential rice cooker you want to buy in the first line of the SERPs, followed by links to shopping websites.

If you type “Jakarta”, the main result would be the pictures of Jakarta in maps and followed by Google maps link. In this case, Google interprets Jakarta as a place and that you want to know where it is on the map or you want to go there, hence the chosen results. It will be different if you put other words in addition to it.

Knowing this, it is important for you to ask yourself: does your keyword has met your audience's intent? Would it be recognized by Google based on its interpretation of users’ intent?

Content Quality

At the end of the day, the most important point in SEO is the quality content. Google itself makes sure the content is good by holding into Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EAT).

Expertise demands you to convey your knowledge of your field in an engaging way. Authority comes with the recognition of other websites in your expertise when other website starts to recommend and put your links on their website; that is your authority.

Expertise and Authority are really the factors that boost readers to your page. However, you need to keep them there satisfied. Their trust towards you is valued by Google. That means, if your readers keep being negative towards you, there is a possibility that your rank will come down the ledger.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO plays an important role in determining whether your content reach its intended audience or not. Learning about how it works and how to do it right gives you benefit more than you might expect, so grab your seat and do it!