Create a Path that Guides the right users to your Website: Let's talk SEO

SEO, not to be confused with CEO, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's defined by an article done by Search Engine Watch as "the umbrella term for all the methods you can use to ensure the visibility of your website and its content on search engine results pages." If that's too technical think of it as tools you use that make sure that your content is seen by customers when they're surfing the web by helping the major search engine players like Google, Bing, or Yahoo to filter irrelevant information and put your business at the top of the search results.

Why does your website need SEO?

Now that you've been introduced to what SEO does, let's add some value to it shall we? In case you're not aware of it, you can generate a lot of visits to your website through social media nowadays as I presented on a couple of my past articles, but, the major source of visits are still search engines through the web like Google, Bing or Yahoo as I mentioned earlier because they're the primary research methods of most internet users. So, if in a multitude of website you don't make yours stand out, you'll miss a lot of opportunities to drive traffic to your site.

SEO carries quite a bit of importance if you want to take your business to the World Wide Web, as Search Engine traffic efforts can make or break an organizations success. Some of the most important things to keep in mind when determining if you need SEO are identifying if you have the right consumers going to your website, sometimes Search Engines will send you the wrong audience because they don't understand what kind of content you're offering. Another thing is that when you have the right audience going to your website, you can easily drive traffic of visitors upwards, and maybe the best thing about driving traffi through doing SEO is that its all Organic, meaning that you don't pay for the search engine results users get.

How do Search Engines work?

Search engines have 2 major function:

• Crawling and building an Index. Now imagine Google goes to an amusement park (the World Wide Web), let's say Six Flags, and each of the rides represents a unique document (a website, PDF, JPEG or other files). The search engines need a way to "crawl" through Six Flags and find all of the rides inside of it, so they use the best paths available: links. Links allow the search engines to automated robots called "crawlers" or "spiders" to reach the billions of interconnected documents on the web, or all the rides inside the park.
• Providing users with a ranked list of websites they've determined is the most relevant. Search engines are basically answering machines. When someone goes online to do a search, the search engines go through billions of documents and do 2 things: first, it brings back documents that are provide relevant content to what the user is looking for, and second, it ranks the results based on popularity of the websites with that type of content. And this is where SEO comes in, its primary function? influencing relevance and popularity.

"SEO's primary function is to influence relevance and popularity, creating a path that makes it easier for users to find you when they're using Search Engines."

Time to switch gears and talk about Link Building

Let us quickly define what a Link Building is, as defined by an article done by Moz "The Beginners Guide to Link Building", Link Building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A link is just a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet and they're the tools that search engines use to "crawl" the web. SEO's agree that Link Building is one of the hardest part of the job, so if you can do it effectively, it can really put you in front of the competition.

Link Building is extremely important to SEO because the clearer it is, the easier it is for the Search Engine to interpret it the way you want it to.

There are 2 ways that Search Engines use link:

• To discover new web pages.
• To help determine how well a page should rank in their results.

Hot Topics on SEO in 2018

Search Engines are constantly improving, and with them, SEO begins to mold and transform. The challenge for marketers is to transform with it if they don't want to get behind in the game, it's not enough to just understand it. An article in Forbes done by Dan Smink founder and president of C1 partners, reveals 2 major developments that will shape SEO in 2018, which ironically it's also the name of the article.

• Marketers may start optimizing for Voice Search. People are using voice search now more than ever, and having some insight into what it is they're looking for gives marketers ideas on how to provide a better experience for them, and that's one of the reason we've come to see all these virtual assistants come to be, like Google Home, Siri, Cortana and Alexa. Stats revealed that in 2015 voice search went from 0 to a 10% increase in overall search volume globally, which means that around 50 billion voice searches were performed monthly, an untapped market at the time to be sure.

• The shift to mobile-first indexing will be completed. The rise of Voice Search would've been extremely unlikely without the rise of mobile devices first, as smartphones are the source of most mobiles searches. Google is shifting in the way they do indexing, which originally was crawling through the desktop version of a web page and indexing it in both mobile and desktop search results, and now, it will crawl the mobile version of a website and determine how it should be indexed. So, to stay relevant in today's age, your website needs to be mobile friendly.