SEO in Digital Marketing
Just imagine having an outlet without having any signage onto it – no name, no windows…nothing in particular. You would expect people may drop in out of curiosity, looking for product A, whereas you are selling product B. Now, when you have a shop with a proper name and probably the product image on it, this would attract so many people off the street, and they would ask for what you sell, and some of these customers would tell other potential targets about their buying experience and about your products and your shops.
The first example is like a website that is not optimized, while the second one relates to an optimized website.
SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of making a web page easy to find, easy to crawl, and easy to categorize. It is about helping your customers find out your business from among thousand other companies. SEO is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy. It is basically concerned with a holistic move towards driving customers to your business via online platforms. And to do that, one must ensure the website ranks higher in the SERP (search engine result page). To give you an idea on this, let’s start with this fact of SEO – nearly 14 billion searches online take place every month. The advent of Global economy nearly makes every business have an online presence. Just imagine a fraction of those 14 billion searches happen for your business. To achieve that benchmark, your website must rank higher in the SERP, must perform well in the social media marketing, and the PPC (pay per click) activities must be very well along with other digital marketing tasks.
How does SEO work?
Search engine are not humans but the software that crawls the web page content. So, not like humans search engines are text-driven. They complete a number of activities that bring search results – crawling, scanning and storing (or index), courses of action, measuring pertinence, and recovering. The distinction with an excellence count is that you’re calculating components of design, rather than actions of an individual. For example, some of the elements that are known to build up a quality score are as follows:
- Website names and URLs
-
- Page content
-
- Meta tags
-
- Characteristics of Link
-
- Usability and accessibility
-
- Page design
-
Let’s see how this whole cycle works: Crawling: Every search engine has software, known as Crawler or Spider (in case of Google it is Googlebot), that crawls the webpage content. It is not possible for a crawler to see daily if any new page appeared or any existing page is updated, some crawlers may not visit a webpage for a month or two. In this connection, it should be important to remember what all a search engine can crawl: it cannot crawl image, Flash Movies, JavaScript, Frames, Password protected page, and directories. Therefore, if you have majority of these in your website, it would be better to run a keyword simulator test to see if these are viewable by the spider. Those that are not viewable are not spidered and not indexed or not processed. On the other hand, they will be missing for search engines.
Indexing: Post-crawling content the Spider stores the indexed page in a giant database from where those can be retrieved upon entering a related search string or keyword. For humans this will not be possible, but for search engine, this is every day’s work. Sometimes, the search engines cannot understand the page content. And for that, you need to correctly optimize the page.
Search work: With every search request, the search engine processes, i.e., it contrasts the key phrases searched with the pages indexed and stored in its record. More than millions of pages have the same search phrases. So, the search engine is an act of measuring the relevancy of all the pages and matches with what it indexed as per the keywords inserted in the SERP.
Algorithms: A search algorithm is a diagnostic means that takes a puzzle (when there is a search with a particular keyword), sorts through a record that contains cataloged keywords and the URLs that have relevancy with those keywords, estimates some probable answers, and then reverts pages that have the word or phrase that was looked for, either in the body content or in a URL that directs to the page. Three search algorithms are there – On-site, Off-site, and Whole-site algorithms.
Each type of algorithm definitely looks at different aspects of the webpage, such as Meta tags, title tags, links, keyword density, etc., yet they all are part of a much larger algorithm. That is the reason why same search string generates different results in different search engines having distinct algorithms. And all these search engines (primary, secondary, and targeted) periodically do keep on changing their algorithms, so you must know how to adapt to these changes if you want to stay on the top. This requires sound SEO expertise.
Retrieving: The end–result will be visible in the search results.
SEO and Digital Marketing
Apparently, it seemed there is no such difference between SEO and digital marketing approaches; both execute the
same functions and possess the same skills. Only for marketing needs, different titles are resorted. To understand
this, we need to pay a thorough look on these concepts. The below figure will clearly show how SEO is based as a
subset of digital marketing.
The SEO people are engaged in bringing the organic hits, while the digital marketers aim at total online existence (of a company) that goes beyond SEO. In practice, an SEO consultant generally looks after other areas of digital marketing. And the whole SEO digital marketing service package may be named all under SEO Packages since customers basically comprehend this more easily.
The contemporary trend includes some more services along with optimizing a website and search engine marketing. For example, there are some factors that actually take help of SEO in the sense of selecting the right keywords, such as blogging with SEO content, contextual marketing, behavioural marketing, mobile advertising, Alt-texts in banner advertising, social media marketing, RSS, viral marketing, and video content advertising. And for that a solid digital marketing and SEO strategy should be in place.