Why SEO?

Almost every Internet user uses search engines to find websites on a specific topic. The search engine market is unevenly distributed. Google has a market share of more than 80 percent worldwide , in India it is even over 90 percent. The rest is distributed among the lagging search engines Bing (with Yahoo), Baidu, Yandex and the smaller providers.

A website or an app that ranks as high as possible in the list of search hits of a search engine offers the potential to draw the attention of as many interested parties as possible to your own offer. In order to improve the position in the search results, methods of search engine optimization (Search Engine Optimizing or simply SEO) are used. SEO is a part of search engine marketing (Search Engine Marketing or SEM), which also includes search engine advertising (sponsoring or Search Engine Advertising – SEA) and deals with the paid display of links on the search results page.

The search hits sorted according to topic relevance and other ranking criteria form the so-called organic search results. There are also the so-called sponsored links, i.e. paid advertisements, search ads or ads. The following figure shows how the search results are divided based on the structure of Google’s search results page:

Organic search hits and sponsored links on a search results page

There are different ways to improve the ranking in organic search hits:

– On Page SEO optimization: actions directly related to the programming, structure and content of the site. Examples of this are creating simple and logical navigation, publishing interesting and up-to-date content or avoiding HTML errors. Technical aspects such as the performance of the servers used also fall under the concept of on-site optimization.

– Off Page SEO optimization: This refers to the SEO measures that deal with the linking of the websites. The more high-quality links pointing to a page, the higher its reputation is rated by the search engines.

Sponsorship or Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
The SEA is not about the highest possible placement in the organic search hits, but about paid advertisements for specific keywords. The decisive factor here is not primarily the relevance. Google, for example, uses a bidding process that decides which ads appear. In addition to the click price that an advertiser is willing to pay, the quality of the page, which is measured among other things by the number of clicks on the link, is also evaluated.