Search Engine Optimization: benefits, costs and changes
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method of optimizing web pages in order to gain better search results via search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc), therefore increases the traffics to a website. The idea is that the higher the site appears in the search list, the higher numbers of visitors it will get. Using Internet is considered a daily activity of people globally nowadays so SEO is a very important practice to market your websites.
History of SEO
Back to the beginning of the World Wide Web in 1990, there were no search engines nor were they needed because of the few contents available. Skip a few years ahead and the blooming of search indexes began as internet access became more available and big names started appearing such as Yahoo! services in 1994 and Google in 1998 which still dominate the market till now. The importance factors in search engine algorithms have also changed over time from the simple On Page SEO, page rank to the more complex Link Context or User Signals nowadays.
Advantages
The reason why SEO has been popular since the birth of the Internet Age is because it could bring many benefits to the ones using it. The most obvious benefit is the availability of SEO. The Internet does not rest and is always available 24/24, it also can be accessed from all over the world not bounded by boundary and distance so the marketing done online are very effective and important since globalization is the universal trend. The second advantage is that the people who are actively seeking for the product/service would most likely end up become a customer once they found what they are looking for because otherwise they would not bother searching in first place. Another benefit is that the return on investment would be high since the cost of applying SEO is very low compared to the benefits it bring.
Disadvantages
Because the purpose of SEO is to get the website easily found and accessible to the customers, a high-rank site would normally get many visitors and it could put a strain on the server bandwidth. Pages listed in top position of the search engine also would get unwanted visitors known as “spam” from the people who also are doing SEO to increase their sites’ ranks. To make the website more attractive, there would be many flashes, images, videos and sufficient internet speed connection might required to view its various contents but many places around the world do not have the necessary high speed connection which might hinder a large numbers of potential customers.
Trends and future directions of SEO
As said above, although with a not very long history, SEO has been in constant change and it is crucial to keep up with the popular trends if you want to be competitive in this industry. The dominating movement right now is the rise of Social Media Optimization, direct interaction with your customers through social sites such as Facebook, twitter, etc. With the large numbers of users increasing everyday, having people in social sites read and potentially link it on their own pages would be a great way to promote and get it to first page in search results. Mobile search engine is also another emerging trend that companies should take note of. Rapid development of new phones with better network and utilities along with the introduction of high speed connection (3.5G and 4G) have helped push the usage of mobile tremendously, and developing and designing mobile view for websites would be a smart move to take advantage of this market. Finally, one more thing that is changing is the factor that Google uses to rank sites. About 60-70% of users choose Google as their top choice for search engine and its every movement would affect the way SEO works. Google has recently announced that they would like to focus on the site speed – how fast one website load for the visitors, and they already introduce some tools to help web masters better increase the speed of their sites (Google Page Speed). Therefore, it will be another challenge for websites designers to create pages that are both eye-catching, informative and fast enough so that the visitors do not have to spend a considerable amount to load all the contents.
Tags:google rank siteslink contextsearch engine optimization
