what is SEO marketing 2021

what is SEO marketing? SEO is not something easy to understand? Indeed, during telephone or written interviews, I was able to observe that a large number of people had never heard of this professional field before. This is why I suggest you take a quick tour of what SEO is while explaining its usefulness, how it works, and its risks within a project.

Definition

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a web project and its environment for search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo… More commonly known as natural referencing, its goal is to increase the quality, comprehension, but above all the visibility of a website within search engine results.

Generally speaking, SEO is only the sum of on-site (on-site) and off-site (off-site) optimizations. Then, only the engines decide our eligibility to be suitably visible or not within their results. Of course, around these optimizations, there are a number of things to do like audits, monitoring, planning, etc.

SEO is therefore a special science in the sense that its use only induces the engines (or rather their algorithms) to position, index, and or evaluate us appropriately.

Note that natural referencing is not just the fact of being referenced (in the sense of classified or indexed) within the results, this being purely a tic of language. Also, SEO is not only useful for search engines, but also for users.

Importance

From a general point of view, an SEO strategy acts on natural traffic, that is to say, the traffic coming from the natural and non-sponsored results of the search engines (see illustration.

Usually, it's the top three spots in these natural results that take the majority of traffic. Some studies even speak of nearly 90% of traffic generated on the first page, of which more than 60% exclusively on the first three results. In short, if you are at the bottom of the first page or a few pages down on one of the queries for your activity, you are only getting a tiny portion of natural traffic. This is why SEO is important.

SEO allows you to properly position your pages on several keywords or phrases that bring targeted traffic, that is, related to your business and what you offer. Internet users access your site through targeted queries that direct them to the content they want. This subsequently increases (through their satisfaction) your visits, sales, etc.

Furthermore, it should be noted that positioning is not the only important criterion to observe in SEO today. Indeed, as we saw above, an SEO strategy can improve the environment of a site, which means that your popularity component will also be optimized. You will thus benefit from direct traffic from search engines, but also from indirect traffic from networks social media, or links that point to your site (backlinks).

Risk

In the early 2000s, SEO was much easier than it is today. Indeed, all you had to do was have a good domain name, content stuffed with keywords, links (among other things) and we would get massive visits whatever we did. It was a relatively permissive time as there were few checks or penalties from search engines.

However, today the web has changed a lot. With the arrival of filters and penalties for bad practices (Google Panda, Google Penguin, or others), optimizing a website and its environment has become much more difficult and time-consuming. Indeed, many companies have been penalized by search engines for using techniques that do not comply with search engine rules.

Thus, SEO has now become much more supervised to avoid SPAM, poor quality content, theft, etc. Prioritizing long-term strategies is therefore topical in order to be able to carry out professional work without pitfalls.

In other words, SEO today requires a lot more effort, time, and will, but it is only risky if you want to take risks with techniques at the limit (or more) of engine rules. Either way, it is obvious that a number of SEO questions remain unresolved and the only experience can help.

Operation

As we have seen previously, natural referencing is based on the principle of optimization. However, there are many rules to respect and we must therefore avoid going into exaggerated over-optimization or risky practices causing sanctions, misunderstandings, or more.

To avoid bad choices and accidents, the best way is to prepare while doing regular monitoring. This requires making a complete inventory of the website and then implementing a flexible strategy according to the objectives, budgets, and means of the company.

As marked in the page dedicated to my company, most of the SEOs and I work on SEO points criteria organized around three main axes:

• The technique
• The contents
• Popularity

The Technical part corresponds to optimizations related to the general functioning of a site. There are several areas there such as system administration, web development, web design, ergonomics, etc. These optimizations allow you to start on a good working basis in order to be able to present the added value of a site. Clearly, we are preparing the ground.

The second axis covers the Content. It can be text, images, video, product page, etc. The aim here is to create added value. By analogy, we could compare each piece of content with a product in a storefront store. This part is therefore essential to be able to improve its visibility in the long term (no products choice = no store).

Finally, the third part called Popularity is almost based outside the site. It allows showing highlight added value as well as expertise. All this in order to acquire and retain as many Internet users as possible on their project. This axis is very important because it makes it possible not to drown in the mass.

In summary, SEO is relatively simple ... We look at the means available, we study the site and identify its problems, we create a strategy, we carefully and strategically correct the criteria having an impact, then we question ourselves before to continue the cycle.