Why SEO Has Become The Top Priority Of Multiple Firms

In a world driven by the Internet, it is no surprise that every company’s potential future customer starts from the homepage of a search engine. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the practice of designing a website or web page in such a way that it is highly visible in search engine results. It is a self-functioning cycle- the higher a search result is, the more it is clicked on, the more it is identified as relevant to the keyword, and the higher it goes up in the list. The benefits of SEO are much more evident and in number than those of advertising.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Well SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization meaning using techniques as to make your website more accessible to the users on the internet or to make your website more visible to users trying to access the information you provide through a search engine. Search engines are just like a librarian of a library (in this case the library means all the websites on the internet) and the people that come to the librarian to get information. The librarian has to come up with the best possible answers by keeping track of all the books and what they contain. This is exactly what search engines do to get the most effective websites to the user’s query. SEO: the three most important letters in the business world after CEO. In this day and age where search engines have become as integral a part of our lives as they have of our vocabulary, being ranked high on searches has become essential to stay relevant, and thus, have a business be viewed by the users. Search engines are programmed to go through-quite true to its name- googols of data from across the internet. So how does one go about manipulating these engines to give their page a higher rank? That’s where Search Engine Optimization steps in. Using search engine optimization, one can manipulate the online visibility of their web page without paying money, as ads do. The search engine ranks all web pages relevant to a search, based on certain criteria. The ones with the highest ranks are shown at the top of the page.

Why It’s Important to Businesses:

As most consumers want quick and efficient results, not a lot of them might have the patience to read through the googols of webpages that the search has produced, which is why manipulating the visibility of a business on search engines is key to promoting it in the online realm.

The Search Process: In a Nutshell

The process of a search engine can be understood in the following way: web pages are scanned by Crawlers which go through them and search for keywords relevant to the queries. The pages with the highest number of such keywords are given a higher rank.

The Kinds of SEO

Similar to how a coin has two faces, there exist two main types of SEO practices: White Hat and Black Hat.

• White Hat SEO are those techniques that a search engine recommends. These are counted as “good design”. They involve ethical optimization and no deception. For example, using certain keywords that the user will also be able to see in the content. White Hat SEO techniques are used with the intention of making content more accessible to the user, through the use of relevant keywords and spider algorithms.
  
  
• Black Hat SEO techniques involve deception. They are not approved by search engines and are counted as part of bad design. For example, using text that camouflages with the background in an article about a different topic, or Cloaking: a technique wherein a different page is shown depending on if a search engine is asking for the page or a human. Black Hat SEO techniques are used primarily with the intention of promoting the content only.

The latter, though easy to achieve, is harmful to the brand in the long run, as it may lead to penalization by the search engine and even removal from the listings.

• Grey Hat SEO bridges the gap between the two. This practice involves avoiding penalization by search engines but still doesn’t produce the best content for the users.  

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