Every day millions of searches are performed on major search engines and many of these users are seeking the very information, products or services that your website is offering. Most of these users will not look beyond the first page of search results. If your website is not on the first page, you will miss out on this high quality traffic. Getting organic traffic by ranking high on search engines is the key to the success of any website. This can be accomplished by SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
The importance of getting organic traffic
There was a time when people saved a list of their favorite websites and repeatedly visited them, but that is no longer the case. People have realized the power of search engines. Everyone knows that any major search engine will give them the list of websites that are most relevant to their search. This type of traffic that comes from search engines is called organic traffic and it is worth fighting for.
Organic traffic is free and if you get on to the first page of Google for a relevant keyword with a huge search volume, you will get a good share of this highly targeted traffic. You can continue to benefit from it as long as you maintain your ranking. Most other ways of getting traffic either cost a lot of money or are limited in the volume of visitors that they can provide. Naturally, there is tough competition among websites to get to the first page of search engine results.
SEO starts with keyword research. Getting high search engine rankings for good quality keywords is not easy. It takes time and a lot of hard work to get to those coveted first few positions in the search results. For this, you need both on-page as well as off-page SEO.
The importance of on-page SEO
To provide search results to users, search engines must be aware of the available websites on the subject and the type of information that they contain. They do this by building an index database of millions of web pages. Search engines have special programs called spiders, which constantly crawl the web to detect new websites, detect changes in content and to keep the index databases up-to-date.
To decide the order in which these websites should be presented to a user, search engines have what is known as a ranking algorithm. The ranking algorithm ranks pages according to their quality and relevance to various keywords and this ranking determines the order in which websites are presented on the results shown to users.
Although search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms are complex and do an amazing job, they are just software programs. Programs have limitations when it comes to assessing the type and quality of content on a web page. On-page SEO is all about designing your websites and its contents in a way that exposes their full potential to search engine crawlers and ranking programs.
The importance of off-page SEO
On-page SEO makes it easy for spiders to detect the type of content that your website provides and the keywords to which it is relevant. However, it does not give much information about how good that content is. This is not something that a software program is good at. Judging the quality of content is best left to humans. Search engine spiders are also on the lookout for clues to the quality of your content when they search other places on the internet.
If a resource is of good quality, it will be referred to on other websites, online discussions or shared on social media networks. Spiders gather and keep track of these incoming links and update it in the index database. This information is used by the ranking algorithm to judge the popularity of a website.
All search engines want their users to have the best experience and try to give priority to the most popular web pages related to the user’s search keyword. Needless to say, if your website is unknown to the web community and has no incoming links, it will not be given much importance by search engines. Irrespective of the quality of your content, you will not figure anywhere near the top of the search results. A good quality website without proper off-page SEO is like a magnificent fruit tree on a remote uninhabited island. There are no takers for it because no one knows about its existence.
Getting organic traffic depends on the quality of SEO that you do for your website. Your website traffic, especially high quality traffic, is the key to your success.