Search Engine Optimization(SEO) explanation to a layman

Posted on December 13, 2020

You most probably have come across the term Search Engine Optimization(SEO) while exploring topics on web design and development or internet/digital marketing. You could be wondering what it means? Well, in this post I explain in layman’s language what SEO is.

It is always emphasized that starting a website is the most effective way of establishing your business online presence. That website can help boost the growth of your business by bringing you more sales. Is having a neat website enough?
What is your expectation as the website owner after the development phase is over?

Whatever the kind of website you have, your expectation is that people visit it. It is only then that you will benefit from it. If you have the most beautiful website in the world but no one comes to it, it won’t be serving the purpose for which it was built in the first place. A nice-looking website that no one visits is just like a hotel in a desert or forest where no one lives. It, therefore, is a desire for every website owner that gets as massive traffic as possible.
Traffic is defined as the number of visitors coming to a website.

The more traffic you get to your website, the more likely you are to benefit from it. This can be through growing your brand, generating leads, making sales, or promoting affiliate products among other benefits. There are many different ways you can get people to visit your website such as sharing links on social media, asking your friends and connections to visit it, creating advertisement campaigns on social media with links to your site, advertising in traditional media(newspaper, Tv, radio, etc) among other ways.

However, most of the above-mentioned methods are either less convenient, less effective, or expensive. There is a more effective and powerful way of getting people to your website. That is, making your website to be rendered as one of the results when people search through search engines. Research shows that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. ie, among all the people that visit the various websites 93% of them begin by searching on google, bing, yahoo, etc. It is recorded that 3.5 billion Google searches are conducted every day.

Below is a sample of the results you get when you do a web search on google.

One thing you notice from the screenshot is that there are about 472,000 results returned. The second thing to note is that this page has only 10 organic results(those that appear naturally without being paid for). To view more results you have to click "Next" or on the numbers 1, 2, 3... to get to the next page. Each of the subsequent pages has 10 organic results as well. This means that you can continue clicking next for about 47,200 in order to exhaust all the results returned in this one search.

Some keywords have a very huge number of results such that you can click next for hundreds of million times in order to get to the last page like on the results page below which has over 3.3 billion results.

But just to be honest... How many times do you go past the first page when you conduct a search?

Research shows that 75% of people never go past the first page on a Google search.

This means to really benefit from the search engine results, your website needs to rank as high as possible.

To beat all those thousands, millions, or even billions of other results and land on page 1 is not a walk in the park. Work has to be done. A lot of it! But if done well, it will be very rewarding.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be defined as a set of all the activities done on or outside the website to make it rank in a higher position in the organic search engine results for certain search queries as a way of increasing website traffic.

When you will be looking for a website developer for your new website, or revamping your existing one, it will be a great idea to look for one that is well versed with search engine optimization.