From the course: OMCA™ Certification for Digital Marketers Test Prep

SEO overview: Benefits and terminology

From the course: OMCA™ Certification for Digital Marketers Test Prep

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SEO overview: Benefits and terminology

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- Search engine optimization is one of the most successful and cost effective ways to increase visitors to your website. Businesses consistently cite SEO as a primary factor in their marketing strategy. So what is Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly referred? In simple terms, search engine optimization is the process of increasing a website's rankings in the search engines. Increasing rankings of a website leads to increased visitors which typically leads to more business. So SEO affects the regular, unpaid results of the search engine. SEO best practices don't attempt to fool a search engine by using tricks to create false relevance, but SEO focuses on understanding searchers and their intent. Search engine optimization helps you understand the words that your potential customers use throughout their decision-making process. Then you implement those words into copywriting and programming of your website. In addition to increasing your rankings, there are multiple benefits of using SEO for your company. The initial benefit is gaining more visibility for a wider variety of search terms. In this way, your website increases visibility in search engines for many different searches and types of searches. This leads to a dramatic increase in visitors to your website. The typical result of increased visitors is increased business. A side benefit of increased rankings and visibility in the search engines is greater brand recognition and credibility. Searchers trust search results and companies that show up more have more credibility for searchers. Of course, you're more than familiar with search engines like Google, but I'm going to walk you through the SEO terminology of this very familiar process. First, the keyword. The keyword or the keyword phrase is the primary focus of SEO. A keyword is what the searcher types into the search box in order to find an answer. An example would be a search for best restaurants in Miami. By knowing the keywords that prospective customers or clients use, we can then use that in our content. Second, when the keyword is typed into the search box, the search engine runs an algorithm to find the results. An algorithm is simply an automated set of rules or calculations run by a computer. This is critical as there are billions of webpages on the internet, and the algorithm enables a search engine to run a complex series of processes to find the best results. Third, these results are presented in the search engine results page or the SERP. This is the goal of SEO, to be visible for relevant keywords in the rankings on the search engine results page, the SERP. Fourth, as you look at the results, you'll see that each website or file presented has a consistent format, the blue link, the address of the page, and the text describing the page. This is called the snippet. The snippet is a way of fairly presenting the content of each webpage or result in a consistent manner. Well, there it is. Now you know the SEO industry terminology of a process you probably do every day or multiple times a day.

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