SEO is an important part of online marketing, but also one of the most demanding. The goal of this optimization is to improve the ranking of websites for specific keywords in search engines (like Google) .
You can achieve this goal Search engine optimization by, among other things:
- produce good, high-quality content with added value,
- Build backlinks,
- reduce the page loading time and
- ensure an optimized mobile user experience (keyword “responsive design”).
The higher the ranking of a page in the search results, the higher its visibility and consequently the number of visitors .
Search engines act as a kind of ” gatekeeper ” for all content available online. Statistics show that 68 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. Therefore, the goal here should be to be found quickly and easily in order to reach a large number of people or sell products.
Digression: This is how search engines work
How you achieve this goal is heavily influenc by Google. The internet giant has strict, regularly changing factors that can affect and jeopardize your site’s ranking.
This doesn’t mean that you should lose sight fax lists of your goal, but rather that you should regularly analyze these requirements and optimize your website accordingly .
This is the only way you can reach customers in all phases of the customer journey – i.e. the different phases that your potential customers go through from the first contact to the purchase.
You can see where this all leads: If you don’t practice SEO, you’ll simply fail. This is also illustrated by the following figure: In 2023, over 1.1 billion websites were register worldwide (as of July 2024). Anyone who wants to reach the top 10 or even top 3 of Google search results can only achieve this with consistent search engine optimization .
Before I go into more detail about the different areas of SEO, I would like to briefly explain how search engines work and what conversion shows what number of role the so-call ranking factors play.
This will help you better understand how your content is position in search results and how you can improve your Google ranking and increase the visibility of your website.
Web crawler and index
The importance of SEO stems from the way search engines work. They continuously search the internet with the help of so-call web crawlers . These are programs that automatically search for information on the web and collect data in the process. They are responsible for ensuring that websites are includ in the index of Google and other search engines .
Search engines also use the collect data to evaluate and categorize websites . Important questions to be answer in this context include:
- What topic is cover there?
- How valuable is the site for visitors (keyword “search intent”)?
- How do users interact with the site?
Development of ranking factors and the Google algorithm
In the early days of SEO, search engines used individual ranking factors to determine where a website appeared on the search results page, the Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Page).
Webmasters were keen to use the highest possible keyword density in their texts to meet Google’s ranking factors. Google also considered the number of links leading to a page very important from an early stage.
Marketers therefore began buying links or posting them in publicly accessible areas of the internet. However, these measures did not contribute to the quality of the web content , which is why Google soon pulled the plug:
- Randomly placed links or poorly readable text deserts full of keywords were no longer rewarded.
- Instead, high-quality content was promoted in the rankings.
Since then , Google has continu to business sale lead release new updates that refine the search engine’s mechanisms and expand its algorithms . Some of these updates are very comprehensive and have a major impact on some websites. Other updates, however, are more minor and have only a minor impact.