Anyone who has ever dealt with an e-commerce or promotional business page has come across the much-used term SEO. There are even companies that focus exclusively on SEO and offer related services. So what is SEO and what terms can we come across when dealing with SEO?
SEO, i.e. Search Engine Optimization, is a set of recommendations that a developer follows when developing a website so that the website achieves the best possible results in organic search, i.e. to be at the highest possible position in searches through one of the search engines outside of paid advertising. In Slovakia, it is mainly Google (the world average is about 93 % of all searches in favor of Google).
The position of a website in search is determined by crawling and indexing. Crawling is the process by which a robot goes through links on a web page and then indexes individual subpages, thus incorporating them into search results.
Interventions to improve the position of the website could be divided into several units:
External factors
When we talk about external factors (off-page SEO) that affect the position of the website, we’re mainly talking about the popularity of the site/brand. This is the so-called cross linking, where the position of our website is strengthened by others talking about us. It’s achieved mainly by the so-called natural links (e.g. a partner’s promo article on their website) and in the form of social mentions – whether it’s sharing on social networks, branding (so-called linkless mentions) or reviews (e.g. on TripAdvisor).
Marketing
The right marketing strategy is needed to correctly identify the market segment in which it’s possible to outperform the competition by choosing the right keywords. For example, it can be establishing a blog on our e-shop, which will focus on the part of our range that the competition does not significantly promote and which can therefore outperform others in organic search and promote our brand. Marketing tools also include raising brand awareness through paid search and better work with metadata, meaning a compelling headline and description that appears in search. The attractiveness of a link increases CTR (click-through-rate – the rate of clickthrough, i.e. how many people from those who viewed a page in search, clicked on it) and thus it increases the chance that they will choose our website from the suggestions.
Internal factors
The so-called On-page SEO is the summary of best practices, especially changes to a website that a developer can do to influence SEO. These include optimizing the code to meet the recommended structure (for example, the sequence of headings), accessibility (recommended font size, line spacing), availability on the phone (clickability of elements on the page) or speed (optimization of images and other files, TTFB – Time to first byte, which describes the time it takes until the first content is displayed). The person responsible for content can help with the relevance of the content (relevance between the link, meta data, headings and the content) and the correct creation of the link (memorability, readability and at the same time, it should not look like spam).
In connection with SEO, we might also encounter the term Black hat SEO. The term originated as a reference to black-and-white films, where the positive characters wore white hats and the negative characters wore black ones, and thus it refers to ‘malicious’ practices that try to manipulate the website’s rating in an illegal manner. These include artificially created relevance of content (unnaturally frequent repetition of keywords in the content, link or domain), manual inter-linking (referencing one’s own website, for example on forums, market places, catalogues) or non-original and even copied content.
In conclusion
Website optimization still remains and is likely to remain a fundamental part of brand care in the future, despite the growing potential for relevant advertising targeting. Organic search is also used by many people as a guide in case they don’t remember the exact name of the website or if they aren’t sure if the brand has a website. Also, a customer who has clicked on a paid advertisement in the past and was satisfied with the result of that visit to the website is more likely to use the link in organic search in the future. However, the website must be in a sufficiently high position for this.
