SEO is a complex, multi-faceted subject. The more you learn about it, the more burning questions develop on the how’s and why’s of this digital marketing discipline.
Fear not, for we have rounded up 10 of the most common questions about SEO together with an answer to each.
Check them out the below.
#1: What is SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation refers to the process of using various techniques to help a website become more visible in organic search results. When you attempt to get a page to rank higher in a search engines results pages (SERPS), you engage in SEO with the goal of increasing organic (unpaid) traffic to that page.
#2: Which is better, SEO or PPC?
PPC or Pay-Per-Click advertising enables businesses to bid on the chance to show ads on Google’s search engine results pages. In the age-old debate of SEO versus PPC, the answer lies not in choosing one over the other but using them in a synergistic way where they seamlessly work together.
#3: What are meta descriptions and how important are they?
A meta description is the small snippet of text that appears below your page title on the SERPS. The meta description generally includes information about that specific page to provide users with a summary of what that page is about. Although meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, they are important in the sense of enticing users to click on your result.
#4: What is the difference between inbound links and outbound links?
Inbound links are links that come from other websites to your website; also known as backlinks, inbound links are what SEO’s strive for when performing link building. Outbound links, on the other hand, are links on your website that link out to websites with a different domain name.
#5: What is the difference between crawled and indexed?
When spiders look through the content on your site, this is known as crawling (the initial stage of Google’s ranking process). As these search engines crawl through your website, they index content that they deem worthy of appearing in the search engine.
#6: How long will it take to see results with SEO?
Depending on a range of different factors (content quality, posting frequency, domain strength etc.), different sites will see results in different time periods. However, SEO is a long-term investment that pays dividends over time; new traffic and rankings are not instantaneous and can take months to see results.
#7: Which Search Engines receive the most traffic?
As of the latest statistics, Google accounts for 78.39% of worldwide desktop and laptop searches. Bing takes the second spot with 10.54%, third is Baidu with 4.26% and finally in fourth is Yandex with 3.3%.
#8: What is a sitemap.xml file?
Your sitemap.xml is a file that provides search engines with an efficient list of the URLs on your site. These XML sitemaps are simply text files marked up with tags that identify types of data.
#9: What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file that SEO’s use to instruct spiders how to crawl pages on their website. This file is part of the robots exclusion protocol that indicates whether certain web-crawling software (user agents) can or cannot crawl specific parts of a website.
#10: What is alt text and why is it important?
Although search engines can read text, they are unable to read images. By providing alt text, you can help search engines figure about what the images are about. However, this is not the only use for alt text; it is also used to improve web accessibility by describing what an image is about so that visitors with visual impairments and those using screen-reading tools are abl
