Many companies make the mistake of investing a lot of money into new systems, software, animations and other wow-for-elements. They believe that a brand new content management system (CMS) or more flash / video content will miraculously solve problems with their old website, like lack of visitors or a high bounce rate (used in measurements for digital marketing). What they forget about is the cruel element of successful marketing – up-to-date and appropriate content. SEO is actually the best way of showing the importance of content to the target audience and ensuring the flow of web traffic on a regular basis.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process through which a website is optimized for making sure that it has the highest position rank on the search engines results page. The position of any page is determined by the algorithm of the search engine, which matches keywords entered by the user with keywords on the websites. If companies do not want to spend time on enhancing their search engine results page position, they can pay to appear at the top of the results page (primarily of Google – the search giant). You will find many paid links when you access the search pages of Google.
Paid links can be easily distinguished on the page as they appear in the right column or on top of the list with the small 'Ad' icon. This may affect how the customer perceives such a link. Some may distrust paid links, and therefore they ignore them and move to organic (not paid for links) further down the page. Paid advertising on search engines might be considered a short-term solution (or as part of a high impact campaign, such as sale or raising brand recognition), but in the long term focusing on improving an organic score is more valuable for the brand.
Search engine advertising works for a limited number of keywords, while optimizing our web content can increase range of keywords that will display our page high in the results. Search engines use 'spiders' that visit all existing websites and collect various data about them. They view your website's code, rather than the pretty interface that you can see. When they go through a website, they are looking for keywords and try to classify your website among all the others. To make sure that the 'spider' visits a page and stores the up-to-date details about it, content needs to be updated regularly.
There are a lot of 'tips and tricks' sources available, giving marketers advice on how to improve SEO. Much of this is a guessing game, as search engine algorithms are well guarded secrets. Although we do not have the actual algorithm, there are still several areas that are known for being important for successful SEO. The first rule of optimization is creating good quality content so that the search engine spider will not be able to ignore it in the long run. Apart from that, the overall look of the website should also be optimized to meet the standards of Google.
