SEO refers to a set of techniques aimed at optimizing the positioning of a site on search engines. This search engine is often embodied by Google in France since it collects more than 90% of search traffic in France. Working on natural referencing in France, but also in Europe, therefore consists above all in optimizing a website so that it can appeal to the American giant as much as possible.
The challenges of SEO
What is the point of having a website if it is not viewed by the people for whom it is supposed to be intended? SEO improves the visibility of a site on search engines and therefore increases traffic and popularity. A good natural referencing, i.e. being at least on the first page of Google, and preferably in the first results (in the first position is even better!), Will allow a website to successfully fulfill its objectives. These can be diverse: converting a prospect into a customer, generating sales, making yourself known to the general public, or all of the above. Work on SEO is, therefore, able to increase the turnover of a company (an e-commerce site but also any company from all sectors of activity) significantly. This is not surprising given that significantly improved digital visibility is likely to lead to a strong increase in conversions.
What is the difference between SEO and SEA?
SEO is free (you don't pay a search engine to be well placed) even if it requires time, investment, but also patience because the results can sometimes take a long time to be felt: n ' do not expect to see your positioning move overnight after a few SEO optimizations, instead count on weekdays or even months to see your efforts rewarded! The big advantage is that once installed in the top positions, your site is unlikely to fall unless it is subject to a penalty (or dealing with particularly fierce competitors). In any case, we should not rest on our laurels.
SEA (Search Engine Advertising) refers
to what is called paid referencing. The results are much faster to obtain since
it is a question here of buying advertising space from a search engine (via
Google Ads for example) in order to see his website quickly rank at the top of
the results. The advertiser only pays if his link is clicked by an Internet
user. SEA, therefore, amounts to launching advertising campaigns on a search
engine by choosing one or more keywords likely to be highly sought after by the
target audience. Unlike SEO, which depends on hundreds of algorithms, SEA only
depends on three factors when it comes to ad positioning: the amount of the
bid, the click-through rate, and the "Quality Score". It is not
uncommon to see websites combine both SEA campaigns and SEO optimizations to
increase the digital visibility of their business. Digital marketing skills
will allow you to know how to balance these two levers forming what is called
SEM (Search Engine Marketing).\
Sea (Search Engine Advertising)
How does a search engine work to position websites?
Search engines are equipped with robots (called crawlers)
whose mission is to browse the billions of web pages on the web every day in
order to be able to record (index) them in their catalog of results and offer
them to Internet users when they type a specific request. They are able to read
the computer code of a website in fractions of a second and form an “SEO
opinion” on it. Because these bots do not only scan websites and identify
updates, they are also able to classify these pages according to a hierarchy
predefined by algorithms. It is these little robots that are able to decide,
without human intervention, that a given site deserves to be positioned on the
4th page of results while another deserves to be ranked in 1st position on a
given keyword, that this site deserves to be positioned on the 4th page of
results. Either "cheap sports shoes", "Vendee mobile home
rental" or "Japanese restaurant in Nantes". Knowing that the
vast majority of Internet users do not exceed the very first results of search
engines, we better understand the interest of ensuring that its site is well
referenced: the turnover of a company can vary dramatically. Everything according
to the SEO optimization that has been carried out.
What are the criteria that influence the positioning of a
website?
- To classify websites in a precise order,
- Commonly attended training courses in this field:
- Web Editor
- See all Web Writer training
- Popularity (net linking)
The popularity of a website is of the utmost importance in SEO. This is an off-site optimization unlike the other two levers of natural referencing. This popularity actually comes from the links (backlinks) that you will make from other websites. Does this mean that the more inbound links we get, the more popular we are and the more Google chooses to put us forward in the results? If this was the case at one time, today it is more subtle than that! The backlinks must indeed come from trusted sites, preferably themselves popular so that these links are considered as powerful and relevant by the search engines. Another element to take into account: the theme of the site in question: an external link is judged much more positively if the two sites in question deal with the same domain.
SEO professionals must compete in ingenuity to get links that can boost the popularity of their site. There are many ways to obtain links: an SEO can try to find partners to be able to exchange links, write sufficiently qualitative articles (studies, interviews, surveys) so that they can be taken up by other sites, or by external links, a practice prohibited by Google. The greatest satisfaction is of course to obtain links in a natural way, which is not always obvious depending on the theme and the size of your website.
Last SEO criterion and not the least since it is the code
used to create the website. Even before it goes online, a website is therefore
potentially poorly designed from an SEO point of view. The languages HTML,
CSS, PHP, and JavaScript allow (among others) to design sites respecting the
standards in force, in particular in terms of accessibility. SEOs often have a
minimum of knowledge in web development and are able to provide recommendations
to web developers or integrators so that they can optimize the technical
aspects of the site: page loading speed, respect for responsive design (the site
that s 'suitable for all navigation media), compressed code, etc. There are
many criteria to meet, but if you decide to professionalize yourself in SEO as
an SEO consultant or SEO consultant, you will see that the technical elements
hindering a good SEO of a site are often the same.
You are now, we hope, more familiar with the world of
natural referencing, do not hesitate to follow a remote or face-to-face SEO
training course of one day or more in order to have all the cards in hand for
optimize your digital visibility! The opportunity may also be to discover a new
passion and make it your job by following a longer training in digital
marketing or natural referencing in a school or a training organization.