Specialist in the field of web development, SEO and Internet marketing Sergey Mekeda spoke about the place of SEO in the success of a project at RB resource. Just as expected, SEO optimization is not a panacea (but you won’t get high positions without it). See for yourself.
I meet diametrically opposing views on the role of SEO in the project: someone considers it almost the only condition for success, and someone, on the contrary, completely denies its role and sees charlatans in SEO specialists. Let’s take a step-by-step look at what SEO actually is and what role it has.
Place of SEO in Your Project
Imagine that your company is a Fomula-1 team, and your task is to win the race. If the leader here is a car pilot, then the SEO-person is a mechanic whose task is to maintain the car in working condition.
It is unlikely that your performance will be high if the car has a dangling wheel. At the same time, even a perfect car will not guarantee you victory if you do not press the gas pedal and perform the necessary maneuvers.
Search Engine Optimization helps robots index your site. No more, no less. The mistake will be to instruct the mechanic to control the car, as well as the rejection of his services.
How SEO Works – Stakeholder Principle
To understand how SEO works, let’s analyze the goals of all stakeholders. So we have:
- A user who wants to receive an exhaustive response to a request with maximum time savings. This can be a search for information or a need for a product or service.
- A search engine is a commercial organization whose primary goal is to increase profits. Revenue growth is provided by users who click on advertisements and order services. Obviously, meeting user’s needs is one of the main tasks of a search engine.
Another important task for search engines is to reduce costs. And the biggest costs to search engines are computing power. Building and maintaining servers costs a lot of money. Therefore, it is not surprising that search engines stimulate the development of SEO. Indeed, even minor assistance in organizing and structuring the content on the site by webmasters helps to save huge amounts of money.
The site owner has the goal to get the user from the search and convert it into orders and clicks.
The most important tasks of your site
Now that we understand the true goals of each of the parties, we can say for sure what the search engine expects from us in the first place and formulate two main tasks that our website should solve.
Task 1. High-quality content that will meet the user’s request and will satisfy the visitor’s information needs as much as possible. At the same time, the convenience of submitting information is no less important than its quality.
This is the main task that Internet marketing solves. Today it is the most important factor in ranking a site in search engines. After all, you are creating a site for people, not for robots.
Since one of the tasks of search engines is to reduce costs, for the implementation of the second task there is an urgent need for the services of an SEO specialist.
Task 2 is to facilitate the work of the search robot and save its resources. To do this, the site must comply with the following requirements of search engines:
- closing of all insignificant pages and takes from the index (robots.txt is configured),
- providing a complete list of pages that need to be indexed by the robot (site map)
- ensuring maximum page loading speed (optimization of code, images),
- brief and accurate information on the content of the page (filled with title, description, h1),
- the robot can analyze behavioral factors (counter installed).
This is the basis that helps the search robot in its work. Of course, the SEO specialist will tell you more about “more than 300 ranking factors”, which are also important for the site – and he will be right. But you should understand that only the creator knows the mechanism of the search algorithm, so you can’t say with confidence about the degree of influence of a certain factor, if this was not announced by the search engines themselves. In addition, search algorithms often change faster than SEO experts manage to experimentally confirm their significance.
The solution to the search algorithm is a kind of search for a philosopher’s stone: an endless series of discoveries and insights that will never lead to an end result. That is why often SEO is shrouded in a halo of mystery, and many SEO-people even practice idolatry.
I hope that now you have an idea of the true goals of the search robot and it has become much easier for you to understand how search engine optimization tools work and evaluate the role in the success of your project. The main thing is to find an experienced mechanic for your car and make a sure start. For our part, we at Nix Solutions would be glad to offer our services.