SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization is defined as the technique aimed at acquiring targeted web traffic to its website from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex or any other search engine (which is increasingly similar to more to a response engine). All this, while improving the visibility of the site’s pages in organic results.
Why is SEO important?
In short, SEO represents a huge source of traffic for a website which can have a beneficial effect on its notoriety and the turnover generated.
Below is the breakdown of the sites that are the biggest sources of traffic on the internet (September 2018 figures provided by Sparktoro ).
We can see that almost 60% of all internet traffic starts with a Google search. If we add to Google the figures relating to other major players such as Youtube, Yahoo and Bing we arrive at almost 71% of the total web traffic which comes directly from search engines.
The need for SEO
Consider that you are a company specializing in garden equipment. According to Google, 1,600 people search for “garden equipment rental” every month in Google France.
Consider that the number 1 result in Google receives 20% of all clicks, this represents 320 visitors to your website each month if you are ranked first in the SERPs.
Now let’s quantify that. What is the value of these visitors?
As part of an SEM strategy , if you would run SEA campaigns on Google Ads , the average cost per click (CPC) for that keyword would be $ 1. This means that attracting 320 visitors via advertising campaigns on Google Ads would cost you 320 euros per month.
And that only matches one query. If your site is optimized for SEO, then you will be able to rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of different keywords.
In other industries such as real estate or insurance, the value of traffic from search engines is significantly higher.
For example, marketers pay an average of $ 11 per click for the search phrase “auto insurance quote”.
And that only matches one query. If your site is optimized for SEO, then you will be able to rank for hundreds (sometimes thousands) of different keywords.
In other industries such as real estate or insurance, the value of traffic from search engines is significantly higher.
For example, marketers pay an average of $ 11 per click for the search phrase “auto insurance quote”.
Organic search results
When we talk about organic results, which also refer to SEO results, correspond to results whose display is 100% based on relevance and quality.
It is not possible to pay anything to Google or any other search engine in order to appear higher in the organic results.
Google’s search engine ranks its organic results according to 200 different positioning factors. These results are perceived by the search engine as the web pages that it will judge as relevant, qualitative and authoritative on the topic.
More details are provided later in this article regarding how the search engine algorithm works. But for now, the important thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about SEO, it’s about ranking a site’s pages higher in organic results.
Paid results
Paid results are advertisements (for which you pay) that appear at the very top or at the bottom of natural / organic results.
It is important to remember that paid results are completely independent of organic results. Ads in the paid portion of the results are displayed relative to the cost you will be willing to allocate for each click generated by a visitor.
How does a search engine work ?
When you search for something on Google, Bing, Yahoo or Qwant, an algorithm works around the clock to give you what the engine will consider to be the most relevant result. Google analyzes its index composed of several billion results and web pages in order to find a set of results that will provide the best information compared to the search typed.
How does Google identify and choose the most relevant result?
Although Google does not make public the workings and the precise functioning of its crawler robot as well as the algorithm used, the information officially communicated by the Mountain View firm and the strategies applied for years by seo professional in delhi make it possible to ” identify the main positioning factors on which the engine is based to rank its results.
Relevance
When writing “lemon pie recipe” in the Google search bar, you’re not looking to see anything other than culinary information.
This is the reason why Google searches in priority for web pages which really correlate with your request.
However, Google doesn’t just show the pages it considers most informative and relevant at the top of its results. This is why millions, and sometimes billions of quality pages deemed relevant are generated for each search phrase.
This is why the expression “lemon tart recipe” generates 15,000,000 results in Google.
To rank all these results and display the best at the top of the first page, the algorithm is based on three other elements.
Authority (or popularity)
In SEO, the term “authority” speaks for itself: it is the means that Google uses to identify if your web content published on a page is popular, verified and approved by trusted sites.
However, how does Google judge a web page to be authoritative on the web?
Google analyzes the number of pages on the web that include a link pointing to this page, as well as their quality.
Moreover, the fact that Google measures the popularity of a page according to the links received is a parameter that differentiates it from other engines including Yahoo, which appeared before the Mountain View firm.
Utility
Web content can be viewed as popular, trustworthy and relevant. However, if a content is useless for the Internet user, Google will not see fit to position it in the first results of its index.
Moreover, Google has publicly announced that it makes a clear difference between “qualitative content” and “useful” content.
Quality content is not necessarily useful content for the reader.
Let’s take an example. If you type “paleo diet” into Google.
You click the result that appears first (Result A) which is written by the most reputable expert on the paleo diet. And because this page integrates qualitative content, many people have made point a link (backlink) to it.
