What is SEO and how does it work

Did you ever search for something on your search engine and thought to yourself how did the first results get there? Well, it sure did not get there randomly, which will be discussed in more detail to know how it was done.

What is SEO

The process is called search engine optimization (SEO) and it is basically improving the quality and quantity of the traffic to a website or a web page from the results of search engines by targeting unpaid traffic. 

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that works on the presence of websites in the search results in search engines such as Google and Bing. Once the strategy becomes clear, you would be able to work on increasing your visibility in the search results.

 It uses a very complex algorithm to determine which of the over 10 million pages it has included on the subject you picked to search, would be best to give you the best results.

How does it work?

Search engines use crawlers that go to pages on the web from site to site gathering information about those pages and organizing them in an index. After that, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into consideration many ranking factors to determine the order of each page in every search result.

These search algorithms are made to provide users with relevant, authoritative pages for an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.

Local SEO has become more and more important as people are increasingly using mobile devices for search. Currently, 57% of all searches are done from smart devices, while half of them have local internet.

Why is SEO important?

SEO is important because the higher you rank on a search engine result page, the more views and clicks you would get to your site, in other words, the more effective your SEO efforts, the higher your ranking and your visibility, which is very important considering that a quarter of web users go for the first thing they see.

Small business owners should use SEO to make them more visible and expose them to more and more customers. SEO also helps create brand awareness for these businesses as users on the search engines usually tend to trust sites that are on the first page of the search results.

Which elements affect ranking and visibility?

Crawlability

The first element that matters to search engines is crawlability. Before your content is even ranked, search engines need to know it exists, so they use many ways to discover new content on the web, but the primary way is crawling, and it is highly dependent on internal linking.

Mobile-friendliness

Another important element is mobile-friendliness, which is important because over 60% of searches are made from mobile devices. This increasing percentage led some search engines to shift to mobile-first indexing two years ago.

Page Speed

Page speed means how fast a page can load, and it is a ranking factor on both desktop and mobile. This matters because search engines want the satisfaction of their users, and pages that take too long to load will do the opposite.

Authority

Authority means that your content is trustworthy, high quality, relevant, and has something to offer. It’s becoming important to search engines because it’s becoming more important to web users, and eventually the more authority your site has, the better the ranking.

Content Quality

Because search engines want to rank the most reliable and useful results, they look at signals related to the content such as expertise and authoritativeness. That means the more reachable your content is to the majority of users, the better.

Local SEO

Lately, digital marketing in the Middle East region have been focused more social media traffic and not paying attention to the importance of SEO. Arabic SEO has no proper training and most of the Arabic content is not optimized. This can actually benefit the local SEO agencies because they have less competition in the area.

An Effective Arabic SEO Strategy

Understanding the Arabic users and their culture is very fundamental for the Arabic SEO and it is usually neglected, but it is a major success factor in the Middle East region.

Finding the most relevant and most used search words in the Arabic region can be very helpful to the Arabic SEO. A very important point is not to translate keywords, but localize them, because translating them can lead to targeting ineffective keywords and subsequently leading to losing huge traffic. It can also be helpful to use native SEO copywriters to develop native content that can bring traffic to the Arabic SEO.

The Arabic SEO is proven to be one of the most successful approaches for a long life customer acquisition in the Middle East as the competition is still not high due to poor content translation, lack of Arabic content and focusing on AdWords instead of developing organic growth. 

Final Thoughts

Search engine algorithms change all the time and no one can know that what’s important today will still be important next year, so knowing how search engines work and the attributes they’re looking for when ranking content is essential when trying to rank your content and increase visibility.