Search Engine
Optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a
particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of
results returned by a search engine. In other words, Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your
website to get organic, or un-paid, traffic from the search engine results
page. Search engines want to provide the best service for their users. In other
words, SEO meaning involves making certain changes to your website design and
content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in
hopes that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the
search engine results page. SEO is not an
appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies
can be more effective, such as paid advertising through pay per click (PPC) campaigns,
depending on the site operator's goals. Search engine marketing (SEM) is
the practice of designing, running and optimizing search engine ad campaigns. Its
difference from SEO is most simply depicted as the difference between paid and
unpaid priority ranking in search results. SEM focuses on prominence more so
than relevance; website developers should regard SEM with the utmost importance
with consideration to visibility as most navigate to the primary listings of
their search. A successful Internet marketing campaign may also depend
upon building high-quality web pages to engage and persuade internet users,
setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure
results, and improving a site's conversion rate. In November
2015, Google released a full 160-page version of its Search Quality
Rating Guidelines to the public, which revealed a shift in their focus
towards "usefulness" and mobile search. In recent years the
mobile market has exploded, overtaking the use of desktops, as shown in
by Stat Counter in October 2016 where they analyzed 2.5 million
websites and found that 51.3% of the pages were loaded by a mobile device. Google has
been one of the companies that are utilizing the popularity of mobile usage by
encouraging websites to use their Google Search Console, the
Mobile-Friendly Test, which allows companies to measure up their website to the
search engine results and determine how user-friendly their websites are.