What Is SEO And How Important Is It?

What is SEO and Why Do you need to know it?

What is SEO? is a question many people ask. Today there are over 1,740,000,000 websites on the Internet. To sort through all of it most of us use search engines, to help us find what we want. These search engines have become so good that over 94% of people using them rely on them to find things. Now there’s a lot of good search engines out there but over 85% of people use Google. Now bear in mind the concepts that we are discussing apply to all of them.

When you search for something with Google, you get back a results page. This shows you how many websites are probably relevant to what you are looking for. When you first see that Google page load up you see results at the top, but these results are paid advertising. To see what the organic search results are you need to look below those. You’ll notice that this is just the first results page. And you can see that there are additional pages beyond the first page.

How important is SEO?

However, here’s the important thing, most people don’t know. 94% of people only click what’s on the first page. And instead of going to the next subsequent pages, they will decide to adjust their search terms and start over. Most only click, in what is considered the Golden Triangle the top three or so results. In fact, 63% or so click just in Golden Triangle. This is why optimizing your websites for search engines is so important.

When people search for something that’s relevant to them, and they see your website in their search results, they’re going to click and visit your page. And these aren’t just any visitors, these are people looking for exactly what you offer. So these ones, they are most likely to convert into customers subscribers, etc.  Now if your website isn’t showing up in the first three spots or if it’s not on the first page, it’s like your website doesn’t even exist, no one can even find it.

Have you ever wondered why some websites show up on this first page but others are stuck way down at the bottom? The website’s position in search results is determined by what is referred to as page rank. Every website has a ranking, for particular search terms and keywords.

At the beginning when search engines were just being developed they would search webpages for those exact words. And would give you back a list of websites containing those words. And the websites that contain those words the most would get ranked higher.

How SEO Matters

Now, websites that contain a lot of keywords don’t necessarily mean that they’re more relevant. What matters is whether those websites were cited often by other websites. So websites that are backlinked a lot, meaning it is referred to by other websites, are more likely to be relevant. Search engines today all follow this model, they still look at all of your website’s keywords but they then rank your site’s relevance, based on the number and quality of backlinks to its from other websites. So think of it like this. The keywords allow Google to see your website. Backlinks let Google know whether or not your website can be trusted as relevant.

So yes keywords are important but the backlinks move your website up in the rankings. That’s why the search results that you see are called organic or natural search results. They’re constantly changing based on what people do on the web. Because of this, it’s not surprising that there are two aspects that search engines find and rank pages on. There are two components that correspond to one another.

On-site Search Engine Optimization

The first is the on-site component, this is where you ensure your website is full of keywords relevant to what your site is about. For example, if you sell beach sandals in Florida, you’re going to want to make sure that relevant keywords are on your site, such as; sandals, Florida, ocean, beach, sand, flip-flops, and shoes, things like that.

Off-site Search Engine Optimization

The second component of SEO is called off-site SEO. This is where you work to generate backlinks to your website, From other sources. Links to your site can be created using articles, social media blog posts, discussion boards, etc. But, keep this in mind the more influential or legitimate the website is that links back to you, the more effect that that backlink from that site is going to have on your search results.

So that’s it, SEO is very important because it helps you move to the top of relevant search results. Since almost everyone relies heavily on search engines to help them find anything online, SEO is the most effective way to increase traffic to your site. Good SEO takes time, so the sooner you start or have someone like us at Iron Rhino do the SEO for you, the sooner you move up the results ladder.