In order to attract more visitors to its website and better target them, it is essential to make the site visible in search engine results. Despite simplistic appearances, this constitutes a considerable amount of substantive work, including updates – content, structure – and involves well-targeted communication actions… but not only.
“Referencing”. A term that has been well known since time immemorial in the world of mass retailing, in which every player refers to his products in displays, a term that takes on a whole new dimension when it comes to the Internet tool. Here, there is no question of “management” (of product catalogues), the work of referencing refers directly to other notions, those of “positioning” and “visibility” of sites, and this, in result pages of what we call “search engines” or “search directories”. In concrete terms, SEO on the Internet means improving the positioning of a site’s visibility. Quite simply.
SEO on the Internet is based on two strategies that are as dissimilar as they are complementary, on the one hand the so-called natural (or organic) SEO, and on the other hand the paid SEO; the SEA (Search Engine Advertising).
Natural referencing is none other than a link from a page A to a resource B. This is why, since the advent of search engines, the objective is for a site manager to work on all the elements internal and external to the site so that the information contained on the site is more easily accessible to both Internet users and search engines. The decisive criteria that will be taken into account for a good SEO are 250 (!) at Google, the ultra-leader in the field. The notoriety of the site, the relevance of the content, the structure of the site, the quality of incoming links, the choice of keywords are, as such, essential.
The second strategy is based on the purchase of space. Advertising budgets are invested in the form of auctions.
A good positioning on search engines is the guarantee of the creation of traffic on a website, which is synonymous with visibility and therefore attendance. In other words, without knowing the address of the site, the Internet user must be able to access it as naturally as possible. However, the more the site appears at the top of the searches carried out by the Internet user, the more likely it is to be consulted. It even appears that more than a third of Internet users click on the first link displayed on the results page. At the same time, 95% of Internet users use a search engine to find information on the web. It goes without saying the importance of a good SEO.
The purpose of natural referencing is to remain effective throughout the life of a website, if it is supported by a fundamental work of updating and communication actions. To do this, it is essential to know the workings of a search engine.
A search engine, once the new pages have been located and added to its databases, evaluates each of these pages using a powerful algorithm, which assigns a well-defined score to each keyword related to the content of the page in question. Also, it is mainly the content of the site’s pages that will ensure a more or less good ranking on search engines, as well as the number of links from other sites.
As soon as the Internet user enters a sequence of words during a search, the search engine extracts from its algorithm the websites that display the best match with the keywords entered. In this respect, the search for the right keywords is the first (and most important!) step in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process.
Content optimization, by using for example a corporate blog, is also a very important step, with the title of the pages as the first order element, which must correspond to the specific content of each page. It is important to link the contents of each page (text and architecture) to the keywords selected, while care must be taken to ensure that the URLs are “meaningful”, i.e. descriptive and therefore contain keywords “advertising” the content of the site and pages.
As for interactive content (photos, videos, etc.), it can also be optimized, since loading time influences search engines.
Finally, the aspect of social networks, which also have an increasing influence in terms of ranking, should not be neglected.
Paid referencing (for example an Google Ads campaign) should be seen as a complementary tool. It is very useful when natural referencing is still lacking or in the context of special offers or seasonal promotions. Adwords’ main asset is, on the one hand, the complete control of the marketing message and, on the other hand, the duration of the campaign. However, the cessation of payment marks the immediate cessation of visibility. Thus, to gain visibility in the long term, investing in SEO is much more relevant, even if the efforts to be made in terms of maintenance are considerable.
