Search engine optimization is one of the key techniques to help your site rank in the huge world of the web. It’s talked about more and more, but specifically what is SEO?

The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to all those strategic techniques aimed at ranking a website on search engines.

The first thing to know is that there is a big difference between indexing and ranking websites, even though many people confuse the meaning of the two terms.

Indexing a site simply means making sure Google knows it exists and includes it among its search results.

The ranking is instead a site’s ability to climb the positions—indeed—of the results that appear in the pages after a specific search. SEO therefore aims to make your site visible among the first search pages and thus with a higher chance of being visited. Did you know that more than 75% of users don’t go beyond the first page of search engines? From the second page onward, your website risks becoming invisible: this shows the importance of good ranking and of fully understanding what SEO is, so you can apply it in the best possible way.

Day by day, users have less and less time and try to optimize it as much as possible by reducing their effort. This leads them not to linger in searches, but rather to consult the results on the first page, most of the time also considered far more authoritative than the others. 

The goal of SEO optimization is to climb positions on search engine pages and ensure that the various search engines can more easily identify the quality of the content of the sites you want to move up in ranking, thanks to a complex system of strategies and techniques that is constantly evolving. 

Here are the main ones:

• Analyze your competitors and your target audience
• Do in-depth research on the keywords that clearly and precisely identify your business and integrate them into your website texts (titles, headings, url, image alt text, meta descriptions)
• Always try to engage the user and provide value
• Write long, in-depth texts that don’t lose sight of readability for a user. Watch out for sentences or paragraphs that are too long; use bullet lists and images or videos
• Add links to relevant websites or to internal pages of your site
• Include multimedia content that isn’t too heavy and that could slow down page loading
• Always build a site optimized for smartphones

Each of these techniques requires careful and in-depth study in order to achieve a good result. Among these, the use of keywords is one of the most important and must be well planned so that the search engine algorithm identifies you as the best and most relevant answer to the user’s search: we must be able to respond to their request. 

SEO optimization therefore has the task of making us appear among the top results when a user is searching for a keyword related to what we do. If they click on our link, we will have obtained an organic visit.

Unlike SEM, Search Engine Marketing, which also includes paid results and has short-term effects, SEO brings long-term benefits and allows you to appear more authoritative to users, who will trust you more than paid ads.

Below you’ll find just some of the many benefits that proper optimization could bring to your site:

• Increase quality site traffic;
• Increase brand reputation;
• Increase the site conversion rate;
• Make it easier to reach potential customers; 
• Allow users to select the topics most relevant to their needs.

SEO optimization that delivers solid results takes time, consistency and attention to every detail that search engines can pick up. For this reason, specific tools are always used to analyze our website and provide guidelines, sometimes relying on an expert who handles analysis, keyword research and the application of all strategies aimed at achieving good online ranking.

Thanks to Flazio, you too can manage your website’s SEO independently from an advanced panel, or request the help of our experts who will optimize your site and help you rank it as well as possible on search engines; for more information click here!