Alt Text, SERP, Meta Tags, Robots, Title Tags, Backlinks, Keywords, Content - these are just few of the many terminologies you’ll need to understand when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). 

So then, what is SEO? 

“93% of online experiences begin with the search engine”

Today we live in a world when looking for answers - the first thing we do is head to the search engine of our choice. It’s also extremely likely that you’ll find your answers within less than 10 search results. All of this is a culmination of what SEO does for your website. 

In short, SEO is a significant exercise for any website as it helps the property to become more visible to search engines resulting in higher traffic and opportunities to convert your visitors. 

It is the art and science of getting your website listed organically in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo.

So why is it important? 

Just imagine that you’ve built a very nice looking website full of modern features and creative content. However you are not going to get much visitors to the website if:

1. When they search for your products, it doesn’t show up on search engines
2. Search engines can’t recognize your website because the content does not seem relevant to the users searching for your products
3. If the customers do find your website, the site takes too long to load, making them lose interest thus bouncing out and never returning again

So even if you spent a lot of effort building an amazing website, it’ll all be wasted if people can’t find it or even want to visit it. That’s where SEO comes in to make a difference for you. 

The SEO practice is based on 4 pillars:

1. Technical SEO - All search engines use ‘spiders’ to constantly crawl the world wide web to search for websites to list properly. Therefore this pillar is focused on ensuring search engines can find and know what to crawl on your website
2. Content & User experience - Now that search engines can find your website, this pillar is focused on ensuring the content they find is relevant and it is what the users are looking for when they make a search on the site
3. On Site SEO - Ensuring your website follows the coding standards is important as this pillar helps spiders to recognize the content they are finding. For example, through your website code, you can indicate which part of your content are titles and which are body copy so the search engines know what they are looking at.
4. Off Site SEO - The previous three pillars were focused on improving your site and search ranking. This last pillar is related to the authority and trust your website has in the world wide web. Which means that search engines aren’t just going to trust you when you say you are the best, it has to also be backed up by other online sources that either link back to your site or have great reviews about your service/products.

As part of our services at ROOTS & DEX, we are well equipped to help any potential partners to improve their online presences through a combination of the services we offer as a group. 

We are also an agency partner of SEMRush in the Asia Pacific region that helps our clients across different borders to improve their website through a combination of SEO, SEM, Digital and social marketing. 

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SEO is not a magic pill that will solve all the problems in one go, in fact SEO is better to be called a marathon as it is a constant practice that needs to be done to keep improving your website and staying relevant with time.