SEO Companies

Two Ways to Get Web Traffic

There are two ways to get traffic from search engines. One of the ways is to buy traffic from search engines through pay per click model. All search engines including Google, Bing and Yahoo allow anyone to buy ads for various keywords and phrases. The advertisers pay the search engines whenever someone clicks on an advertisement.

This is a very popular way of getting traffic from search engines. It is highly targeted and relevant as the user is already searching for that product or service which means that the conversion rate is extremely high for this traffic.

Another way to get traffic from search engines is to rank high in the organic search results. However, ranking high is not easy as competition is extremely tough in almost all the business niches.

Every business these days understand the importance of building a strong online presence and this is the reason that there are currently more than 250 million websites online, a number that is growing at a fast pace. Search engines such as Google and Bing only show up to 10 results on the first page of the results page which means that there is immense competition to get free traffic from the search engines.

Always Changing Ranking Algorithms

Many Google engineers, over the years, have mentioned that the search engine uses over 200 different factors to rank various web pages for the keyword terms entered in the search engine by users. Also, Google engineers have said that they make over 500 changes to their algorithms each year. These small changes are in addition to the big algorithmic updates made by Google such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird among others.

All of these changes and algorithmic updates are aimed at serving better quality results to the users. While these updates have been able to get rid of a lot of spam from the search engine index, these updates have also resulted in a lot of collateral damage where many websites have been punished for almost no fault of their own.

Ranking Factors

As mentioned above, search engines use over 200 different factors to rank websites. While these factors and their weight in the algorithms have never been disclosed by search engines as these can be misused by Webmasters, many search engine optimization experts have been conducting their own tests to figure out the importance of various factors when it comes to ranking a particular web page in the search engine result pages.

Simply put, gaining high ranks in the search engines such as Google is not easy. This is why experts recommend businesses to hire the services of professional and experienced SEO companies to get higher ranks in the search engines for targeted keywords and phrases.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

In simple terms, it may be defined as the process of optimizing a website to gain higher ranks in the search engines for various keywords.

There is no dearth of SEO companies offering a variety of packages with tall advertising claims. However, there is a lot of difference in the quality of work done by various SEO agencies. Therefore, it is important for businesses to understand the work done by an SEO agency to hire the right one for their needs.

What Does an SEO Company Do?

A professional search engine optimization company does a lot of work when they take on a new client. Most of the work done by a SEO company can be categorized into on-page and off-page SEO.

On-Page SEO

This category refers to the various factors that can be managed by making changes on the website itself. One of the most important on-page factors is the structure of the website. The website needs to be structured properly to allow the search engine crawlers access all the web pages on the website.

One of the basics of the site structure analysis is to check various files such as robots.txt and .htaccess to make sure that none of the web pages on the website is not available to search engine crawlers. Sometimes, an erroneous change in these files can prevent some pages or whole categories from getting indexed in the search engines. One way to find out about the number of indexed pages of a website is to check the status of indexed pages in the Google Webmasters account.

If it is found that some pages are not indexed due to errors in these files, changes need to made to get all the pages indexed in search engines. The SEO professional will also check the site map of the website to ensure that search engines are able to easily find all the web pages of the website for inclusion in the search engine index.

Another important part of on-page SEO is various meta elements. These include meta descriptions, title tags as well as on page content. All of these factors affect the ranking of a web page in the search engine result pages. The SEO professional will make sure that every web page has relevant meta description and title tag.

In addition to the above, site speed also plays a role in the ranking of a web page. The SEO professional will make changes to ensure that the web pages load as fast as possible. It not only affects the rankings in the search engines but also affect user experience.

Users are very fickle these days and they usually won’t stay long on a website that takes a lot of time to load. Therefore, it is important that the website loads as fast as possible. The SEO professional use various techniques such as minimizing the CSS and other files to decrease the web page loading speed.

Content Analysis

Among various on-page SEO factors, the quality of content remains one of the biggest factors that affect the ranking of a webpage. A professional SEO company will check the content to make sure that it is of high quality and contains LSI terms to get traffic from long tail searches. They will also diagnose various other content related issues such as poor quality content, duplicate content, grammatically correct content and the ease of reading.

Internal Links

The internal linking plays a very important role in boosting the rank of various internal web pages. They will check whether there are any missing pages and missing links that may lead to 404 errors. They will get rid of all such errors and ensure that the internal links are maintained in an optimized manner. Too many missing links or 404 errors may affect the overall ranking of a website.

Off-Page SEO

As mentioned in the beginning, SEO professionals keep doing their own tests to figure out the importance of various factors used by search engines. Various SEO professionals have determined that the links to a webpage from other web pages remain one of the most important factors when it comes to gaining high rank in the search engine result pages.

Therefore, the main goal of a professional search engine optimization company when it comes to designing a unique SEO campaign for their client is to obtain high quality links from various other authority websites in the business niche. A professional SEO company will start an outreach campaign to get links from other authority websites.

They usually attract links by publishing high-quality guest posts on other websites. Many SEO companies also devise a full-blown content marketing campaign to get high quality links. Infographics are also a popular way to get high quality links for the minds

Conclusion

One of the most important things when it comes to search engine optimization is that it is a dynamic and time-consuming process. As mentioned in the beginning, search engines do not share their algorithms and therefore, the SEO professionals rely on their own testing to figure out the various factors that affect the rankings.

It has also been observed that a search engine campaign takes a long time to achieve results. For instance, for low to medium competition keywords, you may get good results in 6 to 12 months. Similarly, it may take up to 18 months to get results for high competition keywords.

Overall, organic traffic from search engines is considered as the best quality traffic as it converts at a much higher rate as compared to other forms of traffic. In fact, organic traffic converts at a higher rate than the traffic from PPC ads. However, it is important to hire a professional and experienced SEO company to ensure that the SEO campaign is designed and executed in right manner to get lots of targeted traffic for a long time to come.