Main menu

Pages

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing Summary Guide

 Have you heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Some of you may be unfamiliar with it. Therefore, in this post, for those who are unfamiliar with search engine optimization, we will learn about SEO, what is search engine optimization, how to do it, and why. Even those who do not know anything about search engine optimization will be able to understand 'that this is what search engine optimization is through this article.


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


1. What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an optimization operation that increases the quantity and quality of traffic by increasing the ranking and exposure of your website or webpage on search engine results pages. The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to improve organic search results rather than direct traffic or paid keyword advertising (Paid Search) results.


1.1. Understanding Search Engine Optimization Concepts


Your company is looking for a place to open a clothing store that targets a younger audience. Assuming the rent is the same, which would you choose between 'New york' or 'A rural village? Most of the companies we know, not only clothing stores, but also restaurants, cosmetics, and electronics stores, will choose 'New york'. This is because New York is a popular destination for target customers with purchasing power. Search engine optimization is the task of moving your store (website) to New York (the first page of search engine results).


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


Just as offline stores need to be located in a downtown area such as New York to increase sales, a website must also be located in a location frequented by people to drive more web traffic and generate sales. Where do people often go online? According to Alexa's Top 500 website visits worldwide, Google (Google.com) took the top spot. In fact, even without looking at statistical data, if you look at the lifestyles of the people around us, it is natural to access the search engine 'Google' when you need to find information about something, such as when doing homework, working, or making travel plans. You can tell it has become a habit.


1.2. How important is search engine optimization?


It is a fact that people search on Google to find information and even shop. That's why it's easy to understand how important it is for our website to appear high in search results on Google. But how important is it to rank high in search results?


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


As a result of analyzing the Google search result page weblog of  Chitika, a digital marketing company, it was found that 91.5% of the traffic was concentrated on the first page of the search results. In other words, if your company website doesn't appear on the first page of search results when you search for keywords related to your company, your chances of getting audience traffic are significantly less than 1/10.


If you dig a little deeper, there is a difference in the traffic you get depending on your position even within the first page of search results. In other words, the traffic that can be expected when appearing in the first place on the first page of Google search results and in the tenth place on the first page is different. Citing Chitika's findings once again, on average, you can expect 32% of your total traffic when you're first on the front page and 2% of your traffic when you're on the 10th.


In summary, assuming that there are a total of 100 traffic opportunities, the ten links listed on the first page of search results will monopolize traffic from 91 to 92, and among them, the website link that is exposed as the first priority on the first page is 32 It's a story about taking traffic. You can see that the amount of traffic you can get varies greatly depending on your impression rank in search results. And since this 'traffic' is an opportunity to generate sales, the volume of sales and profits of the company is greatly affected by the increase or decrease in traffic.


There are two main ways to put your website on the first page of search results. Search engine optimization and search advertising. Understanding the differences between the two makes it easier to understand search engine optimization.


1.3. Compare Search Engine Optimization and Search Ads


In the screenshot below, the part marked with a red line is exposed at the top of Google search results through search ads, and the blue part is exposed at the top of Google search results through search engine optimization. Can you say that advertising is better than search engine optimization marketing because the area exposed by search ads is higher? Let's look a little further.


https://chitika.com/
https://chitika.com/


For a website to be exposed through search advertisements, you must pay a fee to a search engine (Google, Naver, Daum, etc.). It is usually priced in a cost-per-click (CPC) method, so it is a structure in which a cost is incurred every time a user clicks an ad. For this reason, search ads are inevitably more costly than search engine optimization.


In addition, links exposed through advertisements are marked with ads, and quite a few people say that they do not trust search results marked as advertisements and prefer search results that appear naturally. So, even if you spend a lot of money on search ads because you have a large marketing budget, there are cases where people don't even click and you don't get the marketing results you want.


On the other hand, the advantages of search advertising cannot be ignored. Search engine optimization takes at least three months from the start of work to being reflected in search engines, but in the case of search advertising, After registering your ad and depositing money, you can immediately appear on the first page of search engines.


Although search engine optimization marketing and search advertising look similar, there are many differences between them. If you learn a little more about the difference between search engine optimization and search advertising marketing, you may know what kind of marketing your company needs.


2. Learn how to search engine optimization (SEO)


Search engine optimization literally means getting the conditions of a website that search engines like. If you search on the Internet, Google's search results from ranking factors are close to 200 as of 2017. For reference, since all 200 of Google's ranking factors do not have the same importance, you can enjoy the same search engine optimization effect that Google SEO companies do just by identifying and applying the most important optimization factors. Experience the results of website optimization firsthand through the SEO tasks introduced below.


2.1. Security Protocol (HTTPS)


In 2014, Google noted the importance of security and announced that in the future, websites using the HTTPS security protocol will be scored higher than those using the HTTP plain protocol. And starting in 2017, a warning stating that accessing non-HTTPS websites is not secure has been displayed in the address bar of the Google Chrome browser.


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


SEMrush surveyed the use of security protocols for the top 100,000 websites based on traffic.  In 2014, only 7.6% of websites used security protocols, but in 2017, it is known that 31.5% of websites use security protocols. In a situation where all major websites around the world are switching to HTTPS, it is desirable for a company that values ​​search engine optimization to operate by applying a security protocol whether it is a brand website or a promotional blog.


2.2. Robots.txt (robot exclusion standard file) & Sitemap.xml (sitemap)


robots.txt regulates and controls the search engine robots' access to your website and tells them where your website's sitemap is. If you do not want certain pages on your website to appear in search engines, you can control this by setting up a robots.txt file. The robots.txt is written as a plain text file, not HTML, and must be located in the root directory of your site. Just remember that if you put robots.txt somewhere else, the search bots won't be able to find the file.


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


sitemap.xml is a file listing all the pages on your website and acts like a table of contents for a book. Submitting a sitemap ensures that even webpages not easily found during normal crawls can be crawled and indexed without problems. Therefore, a site with a complex website structure and a deep hierarchical structure must have a sitemap.


2.3. Title & meta description tag (search engine optimization meta tag + other tags)


The title tag corresponds to the title of the web page, and the meta description serves to summarize and explain the central content of the web page. Since each web page of a website contains different content, each web page must have a unique title tag and meta description tag. The title tag has a length limit of 65 characters including spaces in English, and 156 characters in English for the meta description tag. (Since December 2017, Google has doubled the length of the meta description tag to expose it in search results. The new meta description length limit is 320 English characters)


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


It is not necessary to adhere to the length limit of the title tag and meta description tag. However, if the length exceeds the appropriate length, the back part of the search results page will be cut off. And since title tags and meta descriptions have a big impact on user click-through rates, if you want to increase click-through rates, you need to optimize tags through keywords and phrases that people are interested in and work with Google SEO.


2.4. Social Search Engine Optimization Meta Tags


If you look at the Google search engine principle or Google website optimization ranking factor analysis data, there are indicators related to the website's social media activity. Google evaluates the quality of a website from time to time through indicators such as how many times the website is shared on Google Plus and how much traffic is coming from Facebook. That's why diligently sharing and publishing your website's content on social media is also a big part of SEO.


search engine optimization
search engine optimization


The Open Graph tag manages how the main information (title, image, description) of a web page is displayed when a web page URL is shared on social media such as Facebook. What if a webpage that doesn't use the OpenGraph tag is shared on social media? Each social media crawler will then randomly take titles, images, and description content and use them at will.


If you designate a representative title, image, and a brief description for each webpage in advance, when people share the URL on some social media, the predefined information will be shown first. If you want to control the information displayed when your digital assets are shared without putting them in the hands of a third party, you can set up OpenGraph tags and Twitter card tags.


Once you've set up tags, check out the social media channels your target audience uses a lot, and then share your content diligently and communicate with your target audience.


2.5. Image tagging and optimization


Have you ever used image search? In the United States, the use of image search is increasing year by year. To be more specific, more than a third of all searches made on Google in the United States is done on Google Image Search.


Among several HTML tags related to images, the most important for search engine optimization is the image Alt tag. Image Alt tag is an HTML tag that describes the image. We recommend that you set Alt tags for images used on your website whenever possible. Images that are well-tagged with Image Alt tags can rank high in Google image searches and help screen readers understand your web page.


2.6. Mobile Optimization


As mobile search surpassed desktop search in 2015, Google is pursuing a mobile-first strategy. As a result,  mobile optimization has become a significant Google SEO ranking factor, and most of the global companies we know build and operate mobile-friendly websites. Whether a site is mobile-friendly or not can be determined through a  mobile-friendly test provided by Google.


There are two main methods for mobile optimization. It is to create a website that is completely responsive or to operate a website for mobile. In conclusion, creating a responsive website is the best search engine optimization method. A responsive website refers to a site that flexibly displays the screen according to the page resolution and layout of various devices with a single page source. If it is necessary to have a separate website for mobile, it is additionally necessary to clearly express the relationship between the desktop website and the mobile website by using Canonical and Alternate tags, etc.


2.7. Set representative address (HTTPS / HTTP / with-www / without www)


If you understand the principles of the Google search engine, you will immediately see why it is important to set a representative address for your website. The key to search engine optimization is to increase the optimization score of your domain and URL. If there are several ways to access one page, it is recommended to set one representative address and set redirects for the others. If your website allows multiple access routes, learn how to set a representative address for your website and apply it right away to help you manage your domain score.


2.8. Keyword and content optimization


The last Google search engine optimization method I will introduce is a keyword and content optimization. Keywords play a very important role in Google and Naver search engine optimization. If the optimization elements mentioned in 2.1 to 2.7 are rather technical and difficult for non-developers to understand, the keyword and content optimization I will explain this time is an optimization element that non-developers can easily understand. Content optimization is easy to understand, but it's also the most difficult part for Google SEOs and SEO experts alike.


Google loves content that is unique and rich in information. Therefore, if you copy and paste an article from another site as it is because the content is good, or write and publish articles in various fields based on the ranking of search terms that are trending these days, you may be subject to sanctions by Google. Even if you're lucky and not sanctioned, this unplanned content is very unlikely to reach the top ranks because of its low topical relevance to its field. Therefore, when planning content, it is better to think about what field and topic your website should be related to, find keywords related to the topic, and then write the content.


Keyword optimization can start with a keyword research tool. Enter a keyword into a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Twinword Ideas and you will receive hundreds of related keywords related to that keyword. Based on the results, we can select keywords with high search volume and low competition index that are relevant to our company and apply them to various parts such as website content, title and meta description tags, image Alt tags, and URL names to complete optimization. there is.


As I explained above, search engine optimization is the process of moving your store (website) to New York (the first page of search engine search results) in a nutshell. It means technical and strategic work to more effectively expose the content of web pages to customers. For this, it is necessary to understand the algorithm of the search engine to build the technical elements of the website, and to compose the content of the website by understanding the user.


Search engine optimization is not a simple task. SEO itself takes a lot of time, but it takes a lot of time for the optimization results to be reflected in search engines. However, it is necessary to start first among various marketing campaigns such as email marketing, search advertisement, and social media, and the optimization know-how such as keywords obtained through search engine optimization can be used in other marketing campaigns.


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) FAQ


What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?


Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an optimization operation that increases the quantity and quality of traffic by increasing the ranking and exposure of your website or webpage on search engine results pages. The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to improve organic search results rather than direct traffic or paid keyword advertising (Paid Search) results.


Why is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) more advantageous than Search Advertising (PPC)?


It is cheaper than search ads and has a high click-through rate for users. In addition, search engine optimization, which induces traffic through the publication of content desired by target customers, regardless of advertising expenditure, has no effect on advertising campaigns, so the traffic effect is long-lasting. 


What is the appropriate length for a title tag and meta description?


  • The appropriate length of a title tag: is 30-65 English characters.

  • The appropriate length of meta description: 70~155 English characters.


Comments