MZUZU UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES SUBMITTED TO : MR E. BANDA SUBMITTED BY : CHIFUNIRO MKANDA REG NUMBER : BACSDL4118 PROGRAM : B.A. (COMMUNICATION STUDIES) COURSE TITLE : DIGITAL MARKETING COURSE CODE : 3606 LEVEL :3 SEMESTER :6 TASK : DISCUSSING THE CONCEPT OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION. DUE DATE : 20 JANUARY 2023. DISCUSSING THE CONCEPT OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION. 1. Description of SEO -SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website's technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better (Agarwal, 2009). 2. SEO process - Research, including business research, competitor analysis, current state assessment, and keyword searching - Planning and strategy, including decisions on how to handle content, build links to the website, manage social media presence and technical implementation strategies - Implementation, where optimization decisions on a site’s webpages and the website as a whole are executed - Monitoring, where the activity of web spiders, traffic, search engine rankings, and other metrics are observed for producing reports on which assessment will be performed - Assessment, involving checking the summarized effects of the strategy (and its implementation) against the SEO process’s stated targets - Maintenance, where both minor and major problems with the website’s operation are handled as they arise such as, new content that needs optimization according to the strategy (Frydenberg & Miko, 2011). 3. Success factors for effective SEO - Secure and Accessible Website: It helps make the content more accessible for users (and crawlers). Accessibility allows your content to be found and understood easily by everyone, regardless of any disabilities. -Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed): Because it is one of the key determining factors for Google's algorithm. Slow sites turn visitors away. Fast sites provide good user experiences for your visitors, and Google will rank those sites higher than slow-loading ones. -Mobile Friendliness: it's a ranking signal in both Google and Bing's algorithms when it detects a user is searching on a mobile device. Websites that are mobile friendly, in general, will outrank non-mobile friendly sites in mobile search results. -Domain Age, URL, and Authority: describes how old the website is and how long the website has been active. For search engines like Google, domain age is typically based on when it is first identified through a link on the Internet or when the website is first indexed. -Optimized Content: It involves making a website more user-friendly, using relevant keywords, optimizing metadata, and building high-quality links. -Technical SEO: it essentially ensures that your website is easy to navigate and is free of any technical issues that prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. You should implement technical SEO to attract organic traffic and turn that traffic into customers. -User Experience (RankBrain): Focused on behaviour metrics, such as the site's bounce rate, organic Click-Through Rate (CTR), pages per session, and dwell time, Rank Brain informs Google whether the visitors enjoy navigating through your site -Links: there is a direct correlation between quality/quantity of links to your site and how much search traffic your site receives. For small businesses, more links = more search traffic = more customers (Porter, 2011). 4. Two types of search engine optimisation and how they work - On-page SEO – Anything on your web pages – Blogs, product copy, web copy. - Off-page SEO – Anything which happens away from your website that helps with your SEO Strategy- Backlinks 5. Measuring the success of search engine optimisation A). Organic Traffic - When searchers type a question, word, or string of words into a search engine, they will get a set of results showing the ads and pages related to the search query. Organic traffic is the number of visitors your site generates from people clicking on your webpages when they come up from search engine results. Organic search traffic is what you want for your website because it’s targeted. The person is looking for something specific, and if you can provide a solution, you’ll gain a new subscriber or customer. It’s also an effective indicator of the overall progress of your SEO strategy. Improvement in organic search results means your website’s visibility through keyword ranking has gone up (Malaga, 2007). B). Keyword Ranking - A keyword is a term that encompasses anything searched on a search engine. A single word or phrase is considered a keyword if it produces a results page on Google or any other search engine. To see results with this metric, your website and content need to be optimized to rank on top of search engines’ results for specific keywords and long-tail keywords. A simple way to track your Google ranking for keywords related to your business or products is to do a Google search. The results will show you where your website ranks for said competitive keywords. The ultimate goal is to get on the first page and as close to the top of Google as possible, considering more than 25% of people click on the first Google search result (Evans, 2007). C). SERP Visibility - For every query, Google produces an outcome or a search engine results page (SERP). These outcomes consist of organic results, ads, and SERP features. Examples of SERP features include featured snippets (instant answer), knowledge panels, and image packs. Search engine visibility measures how many people see your website in the search results, which could be affected by the authority of the SERP features. But overall, this metric gives you a bird’s eye view of your SEO progress. It's essential to keep your business listing information up to date to improve search visibility, so make sure you know how to edit your Google business listing (Curran, 2004). D). Click-Through Rate. - Is a metric that measures the ratio of users who clicked on the hyperlink to the total number of people who saw the hyperlink. In SEO, it is used to see how many people clicked on the snippet of your page in the SERP. E). Bounce Rate. -Is the percentage of single-engagement visits to your site. That is the number of visitors who come to your page and leave without viewing any other page on your website F). Website Authority Over Time (Domain Authority). - It is a strong indicator of a website's ability to rank in search engines. A high Domain Authority (DA) score means that your website is more likely to rank for competitive keywords, while a low DA score indicates that your site may struggle to rank for even long-tail keywords (Malaga, 2010). REFERENCES Agarwal, N. (2009). SEO – An effective online marketing tool. Digital Marketing. Retrieved from http://www.eyebridge.in/blog/ seo-definition Curran, K. (2004). Tips for achieving high positioning in the results pages of the major search engines. Information Technology Journal, 3(2), 202–205. doi:10.3923/itj.2004.202.205 Evans, M. P. (2007). Analysing Google rankings through search engine optimization data. Internet Research, 17(1), 21–37. Doi: 10.1108/10662240710730470 Frydenberg, M., & Miko, J. (2011). Taking it to the top: A lesson in search engine optimization. Information Systems Education Journal, 9(1), 24–40. Malaga, R. A. (2007). The value of search engine optimization: An action research project at a new e-commerce site. Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, 5(3), 68–82. Doi: 10.4018/ jeco.2007070105 Malaga, R. A. (2010). Search engine optimization - black and white hat approaches. Advances in Computers, 78, 2–41. Doi: 10.1016/S0065-2458(10)78001-3 Porter, I. (2011). 10 statistics that demonstrate the value of SEO. Retrieved from http://www.intraspin. Com/news/10-statistics-that-demonstrate-the-valueof-seo/
