Whether you are a seasoned research professional or a newbie trying to find your way around the internet, search engines are what we all use, pretty much for everything.
The indexed web contains at least 1.37 billion pages. Now if you are a business owner with a website or an online publisher, the million dollar question is how you make sure that the search engine picks your webpage and puts it ahead of the other billion pages in its results. That is why SEO exists.
Do you know there are more than 115 billion searches per month on Google alone? According to another report, in December 2012, more than 175 billion online searches were conducted worldwide. This translates to an incredible rate of 65,000 searches per second. All these statistics reveal how the search industry is growing big and bigger by each passing day. And why not? As more and more businesses climb the online paradigm, the days of telemarketers, newspaper classifieds, and Yellow Pages are quite over.
In the current times, as is pretty evident from the above shard stats, most people take to internet as the first place to search and find information. Therefore, it is indispensable to have a visible presence, which effectively means that your website should be within the first page of the search engine results for the relevant query.
Why is SEO important?
If not anything more, SEO is certainly the most powerful buzzword in Internet marketing right now. However, those who are in the thick of things, know that SEO is far from easy. Even the most experts are not able to execute their SEO strategy to desired effects. So what does make search engine optimization so important?
Achieving a visible online presence
Advertising is vital for the success of every business. You probably also realize the importance of having an online presence in the current digital age. However, what you actually should look for is not merely an online presence, but a visible online presence. There is a difference in the two.
Popular search engines like Google use complex algorithms to find the most relevant answers to user’s queries. Since the web is nothing but a complex network of hyperlinks and web pages, any answer is presented in the form of a web page.
Taking time to optimize your webpage for a particular search query will result in a higher preference for your page than others and it being rewarded with higher search engine ranking. These high rankings are important as the common behavioral study of internet users has revealed that most of them do not go beyond the first 10 results. Thus high rankings or better visibility means your webpage has a better chance of getting visited by the internet user.
Limitations of search engines
Some might disagree but the truth is that most search engines aren’t as sophisticated so as to understand and see a webpage the same way a human does. It might sound contradictory, but search engine optimization actually helps the search engines to figure out what each page is about and how it may be useful for users. There are many real-world issues that search engine technology is still yet to overcome.
For example, text that doesn’t matches the common terms that people use to search, CMS websites that create duplicate versions of the same page, online forms and poor link structures severly limit the effectiveness of a search engine, and it is up to a person engaged in SEO job to get the technical details of search-engine friendly web development correct.
The importance of SEO keeps on growing
The Forrestor Research Report 2013 clearly reveals that more people are now finding websites by organic means than any other method. The figure has grown 4% , from 50% in 2011 to 54% in 2012. What does this reflects? The importance of SEO is growing and will continue to do so in the near future as well.
The internet is moving target and predicting anything for future isn’t what most experts enjoy doing owing to the constantly shifting landscape. Thus, while content marketing, social media marketing and pay per click are other very important pillars of online marketing, the fact remains that search engine optimization or SEO is going to grow further in significance eclipsing all the other techniques.
