What is SEO and how it will help your business

SEO is an abbreviation of the English "Search Engine Optimization". Simply put, these are methods that will help you bring more people to your website from search engines. Preferably those who are looking for exactly what you offer and will allow you to reach them with your products or services. So it is a type of online marketing. Just as a storefront attracts the attention of passersby on the street, SEO helps your website get noticed in search engine results.

Just like a storefront attracts the attention of passersby on the street, SEO helps your website get noticed in search engine results.

As I discuss further in the article, SEO helps not only with the findability of your website in search engines, but also with the overall improvement of the experience of all visitors to your website. It also helps to tell search engines exactly what is on your site so they can offer it to the people you want to reach with your site.

How search engines work

Before we take a closer look at some basic SEO practices, it's good to remember exactly how search engines work from the point of view of ordinary users, who are largely involved in SEO.

The goal of all search engines such as Google, Bing and even Czech Seznam is to help people find what interests them. Whether it's a product like a lawnmower or needing to find a lawyer. It could be anything really.

They are operated by people telling them what they are looking for and they provide them with a list of links to sites they think have it. On this results page, referred to as SERP (Search Engine Result Page), you can find two types of links:

• Paid (Sponsored)
• Organic

For example, in the results for the query "Logitech mouse", we can see two paid links in the image. Of course, search engines know that people are most likely to click on the link at the top of this list. According to studies, it is even known that the vast majority of people click on links only on the first such page. That's why they offer these first places in results for money.

Paid links

Paid advertising is displayed before all other links and is always marked as paid. Such advertising is a good way to quickly attract many people to your website, but you pay for each click of the search engine users that sends them to your website. The abbreviation PPC (Pay-Per-Click) is often used with this.

However, if your website is of poor quality, the person will leave it very quickly and you will still pay for such a click. I'm not saying that such paid advertising doesn't have its merits, but I primarily recommend focusing on the best possible placement in the organic page ranking, where nothing is paid per click. Only after that, if you are interested in accelerating your brand awareness, you can use some paid advertising.

Search engines tend to have a lot of inertia with unpaid organic links and it is more of a marathon than a run. The first results of quality SEO can be seen even after several months.

SEO is more of a marathon than a run.

Sorting of organic links

For the vast majority of queries, search engines offer millions or even tens of millions of results. And because they want you to use them the next time you search for something, it's in their interest to rank these results as best as possible and give the user a relevant answer to their query as quickly as possible. A ranking algorithm is used for this, which takes into account a huge number of factors and evaluates individual pages. Many of these factors are constantly changing and require constant attention.

Many factors affecting order of links in search results are constantly changing and require constant attention.

For this purpose, Google invented Core Web Vitals, which describes objective metrics for evaluating the quality of web pages.

Google provides a free tool PageSpeed Insights that you can use to measure the Core Web Vitals of any publicly accessible page on the Internet. As a result, you can see a variety of measurements that are shown in the image:

It is important to mention that results can vary greatly from measurement to measurement depending on how busy your site is, page to page, etc. Also in the image you can see that separate measurements are made for mobile users (small screen) and desktop users ( large display).

Let's simply discuss a few basic such metrics and why they can fundamentally affect the ranking of your website in search engines.

Loading speed

One of the most important factors in the objective quality of a given website is how long it takes for a user to see some content after deciding to visit the page. People are very impatient creatures and nowadays they are used to pages being loaded immediately after clicking on a link.

Consumers expect web pages to load in 3 seconds or less.

According to studies, it is known that if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, the vast majority of users leave the site, click the back button and try their luck searching the Internet elsewhere. In the figure below, we can see a rough graph illustrating that the probability of users leaving increases very quickly with increasing page load time.

So for search engines, this metric is of huge importance when ranking results, because they don't want to link to slow sites that people will leave immediately anyway and create a frustrating experience for them.

Therefore, it is important to create web applications with efficiency in mind, so the results are displayed to the visitors as quickly as possible.

Responsive design

The number of people who access the Internet via mobile is still increasing. It is therefore very important that even on devices with a small display, your website can be displayed and controlled without problems. The issues of responsive designs and their importance are discussed in more detail in the article What is responsive design and why is it important.

Security

Nowadays, it is already necessary to have a website available via a secure https connection thanks to the so-called SSL certificate. Such a connection ensures that the data you provide to the site cannot be eavesdropped on the Internet and simply read by anyone. Search engines have been penalized by websites without such security for a long time, and it has become an integral part of building websites.

Accessibility

I consider it important if website developers try to make their websites easy to navigate with the help of various technologies for the disabled. There are a number of tools for them, which are often built into the browser, or even directly into the operating system such as Windows.

Such tools can, for example, read the content of a website to a blind person and allow them to control it. For this, however, it is necessary that the given website be created correctly. I always try to create all my projects with this awareness. Search engines also take this effort into account and appreciate it in the ranking of results.

Backlinks

Another huge factor in ranking a page in search engines is what other pages are linking to it. So it is assumed that if a lot of popular sites refer to a service, article or product, for example, it must be most likely useful for people to know about them and their ranking will go up. These links to your site are called "Backlinks".

In order to be able to rank websites according to this sort of popularity, Google developed the "PageRank" algorithm. Its equivalent is used by all search engines. This is quite a complex algorithm that is beyond the scope of this article.

Keywords

One of the ways search engines know who to send to your website is by analyzing so-called keywords. For example, if you mention different fishing lures on your website, the search engine will remember that fact. Later, if someone types "fishing lures" into a search engine, the search engine will know to include your page in the results of that search.

Analyzing these keywords is another big part of search engine optimization. It is important to know exactly what potential customers of your service or product are looking for on the Internet. Then it's a good idea to mention these frequently searched terms of potential customers on your website and offer them quality content for it. This increases the probability that the right people will discover you on the Internet.

Metadata

Search engines are able to find out a huge amount of useful information from the content of the web pages themselves, which will help ranking them for the right queries. However, the developers of these pages can give them additional information specifying what is on that page.

If, for example, it is a detail of a product on the e-shop, the given page may contain information for the search engine specifying its price, a link to a photo, reviews, etc. This information is generally called metadata. Thanks to them, the search engine then knows exactly how and to whom to recommend the given product. Search engines use such information and help SEO a lot. It is part of the so-called Semantic Web.

Impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on SEO

Nowadays, with the help of generative artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT, it is possible to effortlessly generate a lot of content for your website in a few moments. This is how people try to flood their websites with a large number of different keywords so that the search engines send them as many visitors as possible.

However, Google and other search engines recognize such and other unfair practices and can penalize the websites in question and significantly worsen their search ranking. Therefore, it is important to create the highest quality content that will be unique and will interest people.

Content quality is more important than quantity from an SEO point of view.

If you are interested in this, you can read an article from Google Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content.

Summary

As we saw in the article, SEO is not only search engine optimization, dealing with the ranking of your website in search results. These are the practices of generally improving the experience of all visitors to your website, whether they arrive there through a search engine or from elsewhere. By following them, your potential customers will be more satisfied, they will have more confidence in your products and services, and the probability that they will buy something from you will increase.