What is Search Engine Optimization?

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Topic Brief

You will understand what SEO is and why is it so important in this era of knowledge economy.

Skill(s) the trainee will acquire after completing this topic:

You will understand what Search Engine Optimization is.
You will understand importance of SEO

What is SEO?
Well SEO is short for search engine optimization and there’s nothing really mystical about it you might have heard a lot about SEO and how it works but basically what SEO is is it’s a measurable repeatable process that’s used to send signals to search engines that your pages are worth showing in Google’s index.
Basically Google uses a complex mathematical formula called an
algorithm to give a score to every website and every search people do in Google to figure out which website should rank best for the what for what people are looking for think of the algorithm like a collection of empty buckets one bucket gives you the quality sorry the score for the quality of your site one gives you one bucket gives you a score for how many sites link to you
one bucket gives you a score for how much people trust you and your job in terms of getting your site ranking is to fill up more buckets in the algorithm than any other website and you can affect your search engine ranking by having the highest score in terms of quality of your site in terms of having the highest score for the authority of your website in terms of having the highest score for being the most trusted store for that search people are looking for and the good thing is is that there’s hundreds of buckets and every single one of these buckets in this algorithm these scores that are put together in the algorithm to figure out where you rank is an opportunity for you to fill it up and rank better.
Optimizing your site for search results really means getting the highest score and as many of these points as you can now there are some buckets are worth more than others and the three main buckets that you need to be aware of for search rankings are quality trust and authority so quality.
What Google is trying to measure when they’re trying to figure out what sites should rank is offering something valuable or unique or interesting to Google’s searcher.
for example good content if you’re selling t-shirts and you’re using the same description that every other t-shirt seller is using on their website then you’re not offering anything unique to Google searchers even though your t-shirts might look pretty cool the content is the same as everybody else’s.
Google has no way of telling that your t-shirts or your t-shirts site is better than anybody else’s instead offer people interesting content
for example offer them the ability to personalize their t-shirt give them information on how to wash it what’s the thread count is it stain resistant you know is this something that you should wear in the summer is it more heavier for winter you know give people information or even you know be more creative get people to share pictures of themselves wearing the t-shirt and and create a community of people who are you know interested in your product get a famous person to wear it and share that picture online but do something different do something unique show Google that you are different and better than the other search results.
Trust is another important bucket that you need to be aware of too when you’re trying to get your site to rank in Google Google doesn’t want to show just any website to its searchers it wants to show the best website to its searchers.
They want to show sites that are trustworthy
One thing that Google has indicated that they would like to do is they would like to penalize websites stores and companies that consistently have poor reviews.
If you have many bad reviews in time Google’s going to figure out how to lower your rankings because they don’t want to show those businesses to their searchers.
Prove to Google’s algorithm that you’re trustworthy get other highly authoritative websites to link to you get newspaper articles get industry links get other trusted sites to link to you if you have partners vendors happy customers get them to link to your website to show that you’re highly credible and trustworthy and finally the other really important bucket is Authority Google wants to show sites that are popular if they can show the most popular t-shirt seller to people looking to buy t-shirts online that’s the site they want to show.
You have to convince Google send them signals that your site is the most popular t-shirt site for the kind of t-shirts that you sell.
Fill this bucket by building a fan base build a social network get people to link to you get people to share your t-shirt pages with on their social network saying I want this get people to comment leave testimonials so again show pictures of themselves wearing the product or using the product but create a fan base and then rally them to link to you and talk about you and that’s how you prove to Google that you’re trustworthy and that you’re authoritative.
If you think about it SEO is really just a process of proving to search engines that you are the best site the most authoritative the most trusted the most unique and interesting site that they can offer to their customer the searcher.
Get people to to talk about you produce good quality content get people to link to you and Google will be more confident that you’re the best result that they can offer their searchers and that’s when you start ranking on the first page of Google.