Well, this is a common question among website owners, but with a simple answer. Let’s take a look at some of the most remarkable points of SEO and so you can answer for yourself if it is important or not.
Table of contents
A look in the past
Throughout years, the practice of SEO has been evolving day by day. SEO was born with the need to generate traffic for websites, and thus increase the distribution of goods and services through Internet.
The first and most well-known technique used was to add a lot of keywords related to the website’s content, so that the search engines could find it quickly and position it within the first search results. For a time this was quite effective to website owners but useless to end users, because results ranged from the most generic to the most specific, making it necessary to explore an infinite number of sites or try many searches until finding the right answer. This is one of the main reasons of why this technique began to be considered as a bad practice.
*Note: If you are doing this, Google may give you a bad rating for doing this over-exploitation of keywords.
Where is SEO going?
Search Engine Optimization is taking a new direction focused on the user experience. This makes a lot of sense because if a site offers good usability, design, adaptability, loading time speed, and of course, a content of quality, it will definitely have a high level of traffic. Each of these aspects is very important because SEO is based directly on organic results. That means, that every result is generated through users’ visits who quickly find the website through a basic search, in a social network or through the recommendation of a previous user, and not because of paid results.
All of this, makes many people begin considering that the future definition of SEO could be Search Experience Optimization.
Nowadays, Google is the largest search engine and this is a good reason to follow most of its guidelines. To comply 100% of Google’s guidelines is really complicated because its classification algorithm is constantly updated with the purpose of detecting the sites with higher quality for users (loading time, quality content, images, readability of URL’s, etc).
Why is SEO important?
Now you know a little of its history, a little of its present and even what SEO could be in the, not too distant, future. Let’s see the importance of SEO on a website.
It is quite simple to expose SEO’s importance by taking an example from everyday life:
Assume a website that provides IT services, which is not optimized for mobile devices, its loading time is terrible, the few images it uses are with poor resolution and, if not enough, the meta description of the site is full of generic keywords such as “services”, “web”, “software”, etc. With a bit of luck, it will be positioned within the first search results, but it will receive visits from users who probably do not find what they were really looking for and who also will be disappointed about the site for the poor quality of the content, the time of loading and the bad appearance on mobile devices. On the other hand, if this site performs an SEO optimization using a keyword research tool, the owner could use terms such as “on-demand software”, “data scientist”, “web development services”, etc. The site will have minus traffic but with greater value, because it will be fully focused on the public that the owner wants to attract. In the medium term the site will improve its position in Google.
In summary
Nowadays SEO optimization is of utmost importance so that our websites have the best possible traffic always focused on a specific public, optimization is not a cost, it is an investment.
These are the points that can be considered as basic when performing an optimization:
- Quality content
- Friendly URLs
- Keyword research
- HTML code optimization
- A charge time < 2 seconds is ideal
- User experience
- Responsive design
