What Is Search Engine Optimization?

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO for short) is neither a science nor an art. Rather, SEO is a craft, a combination of flair for creative content creation and a set of methodical processes.

Search engine optimization is a process that brings in quality targeted traffic and that too droves of visitors without intrusive advertising. This traffic is also called organic traffic or natural search traffic.

Human Attention Span Attrition

A study by Microsoft showed that the attention span of humans today is approximately 8 seconds. This cannot be far from the truth.

With the never ending diversions appearing on a multitude of devices including mobile phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, TV, connected TV and everything that goes with it, we are bombarded with every possible distraction from ads to messaging and other things in-between,  pushed out relentlessly at us, on an unprecedented scale. We have gotten used to living with noise (not in audible sense but more in terms of distractions).

Search Engine Optimization Is Pull Marketing

Search engine optimization shines primarily as a pull marketing mechanism wherein a user searches on Google or Bing for a product she heard her colleagues at work talk about. This search is driven by user interest.

When the user searches for the product, if your website sells that, all you have to do is have a great write up about the product definition, its benefits, how it makes user’s life easy, a discounted offer and a great money back warranty.

In the real world, the timing of being in the right place at the right time is vital and so is it in this case. With your site ranked on top of Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and having high visibility, the user reads everything on your sales page and hits the Buy button and you have a sale.

It is a smooth process with a happy user and a happier seller in you. No sales pitch in the face or anything of that kind. The above case is a classic example of pull marketing, with Google being your able sales agent.

Search Intent Is Key In SEO

The biggest puzzle the search engines have been trying to solve to this day is the intent behind a user’s search. As humans, we do not find it hard to understand the “context” in which things are said and done. But search engines are machine driven algorithms, set of logical instructions.

When you type tires in Google, you will get generic information about tires with a Wikipedia result at the top, popular tire brands and really general information. The minute you refine this search to tire repairs, Google knows that you are looking to repair your vehicle tires.

Based on your geo location, it starts with local results for tire repairs/mechanics near you. Then it shows the service pages of major tire repair chains in your suburb or city. Add to the mix Youtube videos on tire repairs and a few Google Images. As the intent gets clearer, the results get qualitatively superior.

With advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, Google can understand content better than even humans. It has a massive repository of indexed data that it can keep comparing new information with and enhance its experiential learning, incrementing its knowledge base all the time.

Interesting Fun Facts On SEO

1. Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day (Internetlivestats, 2019)
2. 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge)
3. 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the 2nd page. (Backlinko)
4. 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search. (BrightEdge)
5. 92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps. (Sparktoro)
6. SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media. (BrightEdge)
7. 69.7% of search queries contain four words or more (these are long tail keywords)
8. 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc) is their highest quality source of leads. (HubSpot)
9. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate. (HubSpot)
   (Source: Ahrefs)

Benefits Of Being At The Top Of Google Rankings

The increased visibility leads to a deluge of traffic to your site. This is proven by the statistic where the top 5 listings on Page 1 of Google SERPs hog 68% of the clicks. To get a slice of that traffic, your site has to earn its place based on hard work and also be worthy of occupying that spot.

Visitors get familiar with your site and you are considered an authority in that niche you rank in. The content has a great chance of being shared by users on social media. Conversions among new visitors tend to be favorable.

What Is The Secret To Ranking At The Top Of Google?

There is almost infinite amount of information on cyberspace about the myriad ways of ranking at the top of Google. These include keyword research, site structure, content architecture, on page optimization, off page optimization, social media marketing and so many other factors.

Factors like domain age and domain trust are temporal and play a big role in the final ranking of the site. Page load speed is a singular most crucial technical factor that can make a huge difference to your ranking.

Ensure Everything You Do On Your Site Is Geared to Humans

From my 20+ years of experience in the search engine optimization space, the one fact that has stood out for me is this – Whatever you do on your site, make sure it is for the benefit of your human readers.

The most popular belief is to lay the red carpet for the search bots, ensure they can crawl and consume the spider food (aka content) on your website, on page factors like title, meta description, placement of keywords on the page, keyword density and so many other technical considerations.

I am not asking you to throw these to the winds. Your primary aim should be to make the navigation of your site simple and easy to your users. Help them find the content they are looking for. Have well defined clear Calls to Action (CTA) on every meaningful page on the site.

Make sure your content is easy to read. Keep paragraphs short. Keep the sentence length optimal so these all appeal to the human eye. Have enough white space to clearly segment blocks of content. Remember that most scan through web pages and start reading only when something catches their eye.

NOTE: At the end of the day, it is only a human that is going to buy your product or service. Do not expect a Google bot or Bing bot to transact in any way on your site.

Content Determines The Merit Of Your Bid For A Top Position

The most important part is your content. Today, search engines are so sophisticated that they can understand content much better than even humans. If you are going to plagiarize content and stick it on your site, you will get penalized big time.

Poorly written content will not even allow your pages to get into the Google index. Google has an unsaid minimum threshold value which your content page has to muster before it can be admitted into the Google index. Forget about rankings if your page cannot even enter the Google index.

If you are an “expert” and want Google to recognize your expertise in your subject, content is the key determinant. You can have the most perfectly optimized page, the best keyword density, the optimal backlink count pointing to your site and the works.

If your content does not stand up to Google’s stringent standards of providing best experience to its searchers, you need to put in more work. Remember there are 400 factors or so in Google’s ranking algorithm and SEO is definitely not for the faint hearted.

Understand Importance Of Top Google Rankings

If you are writing about Search engine optimization, Google expects you to be an expert in your domain. This is reflected by the content you weave on your pages. If you cannot prove your merit in Google’s eyes, then you don’t make the cut.

What Google expects from your content is to provide its users a fantastic experience. If your content addresses the important problems in your niche and provides really healthy solutions, your users are going to love it.

The more they spend time on your site and the more they share your content with the rest of the world, these are strong signals for Google that your content is likeable and of great quality.

Remember that it takes lot of hard work, time and effort all rolled in one to make it to the top of the search engine rankings. If you are up and game for it, then a concerted long term approach where you create and publish content regularly on your website is the key to the success of your organic ranking strategy.

Why Is Winning In SEO The Ultimate Game?

Nearly 75% of desktop traffic world over is attributed to Google search followed by searches on Bing and Baidu. This organic search medium is the most potent converter of casual visitors into focused followers/customers.

As the world sees a huge shift in advertising in the digital space, with new technologies exploding and devices multiplying, there is no dearth of ways to reach customers in your niche.

Amidst all this chaos, organic traffic still remains king which in turn leads to the oft repeated statement – Content is king. Content is the fuel that drives the natural search space.

Basic Math Concept of Google Search

In Math, we have this concept of vector spaces. Imagine a user searching for green tennis shoes, a generic search term. This is likened to a vector. Google sifts through its index and picks out a bunch of search results, each a vector, and sorts them by running it through its ranking wringer and finally displays the sorted results on its SERPs.

There is a dot product of two vectors here which in math terms is a . b = |a| |b| Cos Θ where Θ is the angle between the two vectors. If Θ is close to 0 degrees, then Cos 0 is 1 giving a final result of product of absolute values of a and b.

This strong correlation results in a top ranking. This is the general underlying mathematical concept. There are several other goodies wrapped around this making the search algorithm a very complex one.

Provide A Rich User Experience To Your Users

Stick to your guns and ensure you provide a pleasant user experience to your followers. Do not worry about algorithms and the complexities of ranking. Write useful content that solves the problems in your domain.

All that Google cares is providing a rich user experience to its searchers. A #1 result is number one for a reason – that is to delight the user by answering her question she had in mind when she visited the site. This is what matters the most. Prove you are an expert in your niche and the rewards will follow suit.

Over this series of forthcoming blog posts on search engine optimization, we will look at the basics of seo, the way search engines work, the on page factors, the off page factors and the works.

A Word Of Warning – Do Not Manipulate The Search Engines!

Yes, you read that right. Do not indulge in harmful practices/processes that can get your site banned from the search engines.

These include but are not limited to keyword spamming, building thousands of backlinks overnight with a software that no human can achieve, plagiarized content, comment spam, blogging networks etc.

Google is a massive AI / Machine Learning driven juggernaut. It may seem like a giant tumbleweed emoji but it will catch up with such practices one day and send the site to eternal hell.

At Traffic Alignment, we help small businesses optimize their site through content that is marketed through a nominal ad spend on social media sites and gaining domain authority and trust in the process. Contact us for your content marketing needs. We are just a call away!