Let’s talk about search engine optimization a.k.a SEO. It is quite a mouthful per se, yet remarkably misunderstood.
Perhaps you have heard or seen this jargon before. Maybe you could grasp the meaning, but SEO is the one thing that keeps you perplex by its functionality and complexity.
Lucky for you, we are generously spilling the beans on this topic so you can nod your head with complete understanding. Eventually, you will become a firm believer in SEO.
What is SEO Malaysia?
Search engines have become an ever-increasing important factor in business promotion. The king of search, Google receives 5.6 billion searches per day, an astonishing feat that shows the importance of search engine.
Over 95% of people use the Internet to buy a product or service. It is crucial to have a website to promote businesses or services as a way to get web visitors.
Nobody wants to get unnoticed. That’s why a website’s owner would love to be on number one on Google for their main keyword. However, it takes time and effort and perseverance. You need to optimize your website for the best chances of achieving this with search engine optimization (SEO). So how you do this?
How does the search engine work?
Search engine like Google uses a complex mathematical formula to “rank” websites on importance and relevance to specific keywords. It discovers and catalogs all available content on the Internet like web pages, PDFs, images or videos via a process known as “crawling and indexing” and the process of “ranking” will match the query.
How can search results be “organic”?
The organic search results earn through effective SEO by typing specific keyphrases on the search engine.
For example, if you search for “Malaysia weather,” you’ll see a weather forecast for Malaysia directly in the search result pages instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. Moreover, if you search for “SEO Malaysia,” you will see a “local pack” result made up of Malaysia SEO offices. Convenient, right?
It is important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. The goal of the search engine is to solve searcher’s queries, to encourage searchers to come back and to keep them on the search result page longer.
Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) important?
In today digital marketing era, SEO complement the nature of digital marketing.
Millions of users use the search engine every day to look for answers and solutions to their problems. If you have a website, blog, online store, or e-commerce website, SEO can help your online business grow and meet the business objectives.
Search engine optimization is vital for a website because:
- The majority of search engines users are likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results pages (SERPS). That why your website needs to appear on the top 5 positions. It will enhance your chance to attract visitors to your website or e-commerce store.
- SEO is not only about search engines, but having outstanding SEO practices will improve usability and the user experience of a website.
- It gives benefit to the social promotion of the website. Users who find your site by searching Google or Yahoo are more likely to promote it on social media channels.
- It helps smooth website operation. A web developer who understands SEO will take time to audit and ‘heal’ websites which have SEO discrepancy. The advantage of this is it will increase in search engine traffic, and the indirect benefit is having a common framework or checklists need to use before publishing content on the site.
- SEO will put the website ahead of the competition. If two websites are selling the same item, the search engine will optimize websites that make more sales and have more customers.
The least things you have to know about SEO (but it is equally important):
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the first stage of the SEO process. The technical SEO is not involved in the actual content of a website or with website promotion methods.
It has to do with settings to configure to make the job of search engine crawlers easier. Usually, once the technical SEO is correct, you are done.
Checking websites system regularly will reduce any problems that will negatively impact your rankings.
On-Page/ On-Site SEO
The second stage is On-Page SEO. That involved the content and other elements found on a page.
The main aim of on-page SEO is to relay website information to the search engine crawlers so that search engine can understand the meaning and content of the content.
The search engine does not read a page like a human so they will be looking for signals to find out what a page is all about. So that it will ranks higher in the SERPs.
At this stage, we need to deal with website structure, keywords, title optimizations, headings, internal links, image SEO, structured data mark-up and other techniques that can send the right signals to search engines.
By following it correctly, on-page/ on-site SEO will improve the usability and credibility of a website or blog.
Content optimization is part of on-page/ on-site SEO, but sometimes it can be referred to as Content SEO.
Off-page/ Off-site SEO
The third stage in the SEO process is Off-Page/ Off-Site SEO. The other way to improve the website ranking position is by using off-page/ off-site SEO techniques.
Generally, off-page/ off-site SEO is known as link building to promote links to other websites. By building more links to the website, it can boost ranking quickly and increase web presence in the long run.