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SEO Optimization and SEO Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are important components of digital marketing, which includes the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages, through the use of paid placement and contextual advertising.
SEO optimization and search engine marketing (SEO / SEM) effective ways to position the organization on the Internet
SEO optimization and search engine marketing are the search engine marketing strategies that aim to achieve effective website positioning in search engines, and the advantages of Internet marketing strategy in general from the perspective of small and medium-sized companies will be highlighted, also observe the attitudes and trends in the behavior of Internet users in the process of making purchase decisions and the influence of the Internet and search engines on it.
The progress in the development of new technologies has led to the so-called digital era, in which the Internet plays a key role in the development of marketing strategies of organizations.
The marketing strategies and tactics of traditional marketing, such as “mass” marketing, product standardization, or retail sales, have retained their relevance, but organizations more and more need to adopt new practices to better adapt to the changes of this new digital environment.
It is extremely important that the marketing methods and tools used on the Internet are well known and used professionally. The mechanical transfer of marketing concepts from “traditional – offline” marketing to the Internet can lead to unpredictable, often negative results.
Internet marketing is not a campaign and it is not a one time act. It is not sending promotional e-mails to randomly selected recipients or placing advertising banners on randomly selected websites. It is a process of building, developing and confirming the positions of the organization on the Internet.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – What is it?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or search engine optimization is an effective marketing tool to promote a website and increase an organization’s online sales.
SEO provides quality targeted traffic to the organization’s website(s) by achieving high positions in organic search with the most popular search engines in the world – Google, Bing and Yandex. SEO continuously improves the online reputation of a company or brand. The optimization of a site for search engines can successfully lead to an increase in the profitability of the business by increasing its visibility in the Internet space.
SEO is conditionally divided into: on-page, onsite and off-site optimization, and the ultimate goal is always to attract to the site more traffic generated by search engines.
Search engine optimization is a broad niche that includes many specific activities, ranging from correcting a site’s source code and structure, to providing inbound links to the site’s important pages, to conducting online PR activities to promote it. What’s more, the optimization is completely end-user oriented.
Effective optimization ensures that the organization’s site will be presented in a unique way to the Internet audience and therefore will be a valuable resource for search engines as well. Good search engine optimization of an organization’s site ensures that it (the site) will provide users with what they expect from it. Any web resource that follows this basic principle has a real chance of ranking high in organic search results for the most competitive keywords.
About the benefits of search engines
Search engines outperform other media in providing visitors to the site. 85% of Internet users define search engines as the main method for finding information
Traffic from search engines is most valuable because it provides visitors actively searching for a product, service, information or solution to a specific problem.
Search engines work constantly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Why Search Engine Optimization and Marketing is Necessary?
86% of consumers who decide to buy a product or service look for information on the Internet;
93% of users only look at the first two pages of search results. Most people prefer to use another search or another search engine instead of continuing to browse sites past the first 10 results.
33% of users believe that the companies at the top of the results are the main brand in the searched niche.
Search Engine Marketing : According to Christopher Allston, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is
“That part of Internet marketing that applies to search engines, that is, includes all activities designed to generate certain traffic to a given website. The goal is to ensure, through search engines, the maximum number of visitors to the given website who are really interested in its content”
Depending on the context, SEM can be interpreted as an umbrella term for various means of website marketing, including search engine optimization (SEO), whereby website content is “optimized” in order to achieve higher rankings. in the search engine results pages, or it can be differentiated from SEO and be focused only on paid components.
Searching for information is the most frequently used function of the web by Internet users, and they most often turn to search engines and primarily to the Internet giant Google.
The Internet is constantly evolving: every day new websites appear, while others are deleted; it has been found that 320 million websites are created every week. The structure of links is also extremely dynamic – practically their number increases every week by 25%.
These data are proof of the great importance of effective promotion of the website and its positioning in such a way that it is among the first places on the page of the search results, being thus easily discoverable by Internet users.
SEO strategies
In the field of SEO, several strategies can be distinguished to improve the visibility of a website in search engines.
Accessibility
The first strategy consists of accessibility, i.e. it is the set of features or elements that make the website or blog visible for the so-called. spiders on search engines.
When Google and other search engines crawl websites , they use spiders or robots (these are programs that can visit a website and store its content in search engine archives and thus make it accessible, and then every Internet user through the search visits the website).
Good accessibility allows search engines to “notice” the website. However, some documents may not be accessible due to a 404 error, server errors, the inability of certain plugins to display the content correctly, or other technical reasons. All these inconveniences, as well as the slow speed of the serving server, can significantly affect the ranking of the website or blog.
One of the most frequently used practices for positioning in the first places among the results of a given search are the so-called meta tags ( meta tags ), developed in the HTML programming language and used to provide information to users and search engines about the content of the web site.
At the heart of the emergence of meta tags is the need to help search engines to correctly include them in their databases of web sites, when algorithms for targeted analyzes of the text on the page did not yet exist.
Very soon, however, the overcoming of technical limitations and the improvement of increasingly complex algorithms allow to apply the not quite appropriate use of meta tags, which directs the integration of websites or pages in the databases of search engines to the analysis of the text of the content and of the number of links leading to the website.
This gradually led to the abandonment of meta tags, although there is still a myth that they can contribute to exceptional results for a company in search engine positioning.
Quality website content
The second strategy of the optimization of a specific website in the search engines is to provide it with quality content, ie. to develop a website with quality information for Internet users, as well as the site to have many incoming and outgoing links. This SEO strategy is very important as far as
quality content increases the possibilities of more links to the site and hence the chances of better positioning.
However, the quality content should not be only on the homepage of the site (Home page), since there is no guarantee that through the Internet search engines the user will be directed to this page. Therefore, website administrators should focus their efforts on creating high-quality content on all web pages of the website, and the Internet user should be able to “move” from one page to another with ease and logical consistency. A well-designed website that provides clear and detailed information has a much higher chance of ranking high in search results.
Link building
Directly related to the quality of the content is the strategy of building links ( link building ), which can be considered as a “natural” process, to the extent that the creation of links to a given website becomes spontaneous when its content is of quality.
Search engines like Google use technologies like PageRank (Page Rank) to measure the importance of web pages, which is based precisely on the indirect links of one page to another, which is the basis of the evaluation.
However, in recent years, link building has evolved with Google Page Rank playing an important role in how popular a website is and how it is positioned in search engine rankings. Page Rank is a set of rules that Google uses to tell how important it thinks each individual website is.
Ratings range from 0 to 10 and can be seen by any user who has the Google Toolbar on their browser. It is important to emphasize the quality of the texts and pictures on the website. Unique content will bring more traffic from the search engines and give you top rankings on a wide variety of Google search results.
However, this could create some problems in that by purchasing links, the latter are not taken into account in the evaluation of the quality of the website and therefore can reduce the satisfaction of the user.
On-page content of the website
Another SEO strategy aimed at positioning among the first search results is the emphasis on on-page content. For this strategy, it is important to search for specific keywords that reflect the content of the web site, but also synonyms and other alternative variants of the words that are easily applicable in the Internet search.
Therefore, the organization should carefully check which keywords make sense to enter and which ones are easier to enter in the searches performed by the user.
When selecting keywords, the main requirement is to maintain their relevance to the content of the website. Attempting to position search engines for words that then do not match the content of the website to which the user will be directed can not only be considered spam, but will also result in visits to the website by users who are not actually show interest in its content or worse, users will be bored by being directed to a site that has nothing to do with what they are actually looking for.
Another important consideration when choosing keywords is to avoid repeating the same words too much, because in case this trick is prohibited by a given search engine, it can result in the web page in question being penalized by the positioning and brought back in the list of search results.
The choice of keywords turns out to be a very good idea when it comes to sponsored positioning: in this case, the positioning is not only the result of ranking according to the quality of the
content, but also takes into account the “offer”, i.e. the result of bidding between all advertisers to determine the first position for the use of given keywords.
Optimization strategies are constantly changing as Google’s algorithm changes in indexing each site and each page on it. In this regard, the expectations are to continue the changes to the bot algorithm and the development of the optimization for Google.
Unique content
Unique content. The more unique content that is published, the better a website will be optimized. The more often new materials, texts and articles are published, the more respected he will be.
Content that encourages feedback could be called timely and relevant, as well as highly valuable according to search engines. Timely targeted web site content will encourage users to exchange links with each other, which could reflect quite well on the web site’s promotion.
Quality/quantity ratio
Quality/quantity ratio. If a website has good reviews from users, it will inevitably increase the company’s rating among the Internet community and get a higher rank. However, if the website is on the opposite pole, then “everything will be with a minus sign” and to the detriment of the company.
However, the terms attendance and satisfaction should not be confused. Generating more visitors does not always mean that they are satisfied with the materials and texts published and seen by them.
Influence of social networks
Influence of social networks. The organization’s participation in them is mandatory. The importance of social networks is growing incredibly fast and drastically, so the organization is losing every day if it does not become a part of it.
Through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google My Business, it is necessary to encourage users and customers to visit the corporate website and take advantage of the goods/services offered.
Target audiences
Target audiences. The organization may be able to reach not only individuals to attract as its customers, but also has the unique opportunity to discover entire groups of potential customers. With the rapid growth of society in the virtual space, every company has the opportunity to create a huge target audience, thanks to which they can multiply their income.
Geographical location
The geographical location. 2023 will probably be the year of Google Places. It is increasingly noticed that websites that use this service come out on top even with minimal SEO optimization. Together with the social network Google Contributor, Google Places can become a major leading and most important part of the Google algorithm in SEO optimization.
âž¡ search engines represent the leading online search tool for Internet users, with only 12% of respondents using the various directories that compete with search engines in the field of searching for and cataloging information on the Internet. This can partly be explained by Google’s huge distribution share in Europe, which is used by 86% of users, with 61% using it as their default browser homepage on the Internet.
âž¡ Internet users admit that they prefer organic search results, which are believed to best meet their requirements or needs expressed through keywords. Sponsored links are used much less, as the user considers their function to be purely commercial. Overall, the use of sponsored links is quite strong – around 74% of respondents say they have used them at least once, but only 1% of them say they use them often in their searches, and 16% say they don’t never used them.
âž¡ the fact that could be useful for organizations that invest in their presence in search engines is the behavior of users regarding the list of results of the search performed. They highly trust the analytics features on the first page of results, and 31% look at the second page of results the most. This shows how important it is to invest so that the corporate website reaches the top of the list to avoid the risk of it not being seen, or visited by potential customers interested in the company’s products or services.
âž¡ Search engines play an important role in the purchasing decision process of consumers. 82% of respondents said that they use a search engine to learn more about the features of the product they are interested in, 8% claim that they have used it only once, and 9% have never made a
purchase under the influence of information provided from an Internet search engine.
Another important fact that the conducted research establishes is that Internet users are extremely influenced by the information contained on the website of the manufacturer whose product or service they want to buy, before making the purchase; this should be an additional incentive for companies to improve their websites and their inclusion in the databases of search engines, while of course they should always pay close attention to what is said about them on blogs and specialized websites.
