SEO

MISCONCEPTION
Search engine optimization is the most popular term one comes across the moment any business start’s its digital marketing journey. We are approached by so many small businesses which want their website rankings to go up and start showing up on the first page of google search results in two weeks time. A lot of them would have already spent some decent sums of money in improving their rankings. Want to break some typical misconceptions about Search Engine Optimization 1. Its not just some technical magic which an SEO expert will do on your website. I will try to explain a few things in the next section 2. SEO for a page! This is a very myopic view, many will charge based on number of pages which is just a way to simplify and give some unit of measure. Improving ranking for the website is not a 1 or 2 or 5 page magic but an overall website optimization. 3. Guarantee of a ranking, here again I shall explain how to check improvements

HOW MUCH IS TECHNICAL MAGIC?
The technical part is mostly adding the information in the Tags like "Description" Tag or a "Title" Tag or a "Keyword" Tag. This in simple terms meta data for the Google bots/search engine to index the various webpages which exist in on the internet. Just imagine Internet as a big book and Google as the index. To build the index you need the meta information in these tags such as Title of the page etc. There are more aspects about the technical work involved such as mobile friendly website, Website load time..thefaster the better and such. But most important is the tagging which is nothing but giving titles and descriptions. Most of this work is one time and need not be visited unless the content has changes significantly in your website.

WHAT ARE THE TOOLS?
Must have heard about Google Tools. There are a few aspects which are important and the rest incremental Google Tools- Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Webmaster are important 3 tools to understand. Webmaster gives the technology expert the view to improve page indexing, page meta tagging, mobile rendering, speed of the website, rank as per keywords etc. The technical expert then can go and add the missing information in the website code so that it becomes easier for google bots/engines which index the pages to understand you website content Google Analytics gives very good insights of the website visitors browsing behavior, demographic insights, organic and inorganic traffic etc. Google Tag manager allows specific actions such as purchase or adding to card but abandoning etc to be captured and use for re-marketing.

BALANCED APPROACH TO SEO
The big piece that gets missed is that just as a book which becomes successful by its story and not by its bold titles and descriptions. A websites ranking is a lot defined by its content and how useful that content is to the visitor. There is a strong play of content in the overall SEO of the website and also of the other web assets on social media, industry/ community portals, the rich content there with back inks to the website. The website ideally should have fresh content to attract the visitors and an overall balanced approach of technical optimization and content plan will generate the ranking you always desire for your brands/ business. For ranking results get webmaster results and analyze the improvements over time. The rankings change and are dynamic . The clear improvement trends are seen in your google webmaster tool, better than checking on the browser once or twice.