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SEO (also known by its longer name, Search Engine Optimization), is basically how visible your site is in search engines. Search Engine Land defines SEO as “the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches.” It’s important to any online business because the better your website’s visibility is, “the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.”  Basically, Google, Bing, and Yahoo will “crawl” your website’s pages, collecting their information and indexing it. Then, the search engines’ algorithms analyze the indexed pages and determine the order the pages should appear on search results for any given query. There are many search ranking factors that can affect a website’s SEO, including site architecture, speed, mobile-friendliness, content quality, keyword use, and more. How Do Search Engines Work? Before starting with SEO, it is important to understand how search engines work. Your goal with SEO is to influence search engines to ‘trust’ your website, and knowing how they actually rank websites will help you make better decisions. In a nutshell, search engines follow a three-step process to present organic results to a searcher: Crawling – Using special programs (called crawlers or bots), they find publicly available pages on the Internet. Indexing – They extract part of the page data and store it in their search index. Ranking – Using sophisticated ranking algorithms, they present users with the most relevant and useful results. With SEO, you can optimize your website for all stages so that it will appear high in the results for related queries. WHY SEO IS IMPORTANT? SEO is important because it can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines. Search engines serve billions of users per day and if you want to get a portion of the traffic, your website should appear in the top positions for related searches. Enhance User Experience (UX) – SEO is not only about search engines but good SEO practices improve the user experience and usability of a website. Build Credibility With Users – Users trust search engines, and having a presence in the top positions for the keywords the user is searching increases the website’s trust. SEO Is Good For The Social Promotion of Your Website – People who find your website by searching Google or Bing are more likely to promote it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels. SEO Is Important For The Smooth Running of a Big Website – Websites with more than one author can benefit from SEO directly and indirectly. Their direct benefit is increased organic traffic, and their indirect benefit is having a common framework (checklists) to use before publishing content on the site. SEO Can Put You Ahead of The Competition – If two websites are selling the same thing, the SEO optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.   For Example:- First up on our examples of SEO is Nike. Since Nike is a brand and a successful ecommerce store, their SEO focuses on getting people to their website to find and purchase their products by practicing SEO best practices for product pages. That means they must integrate keywords effectively on their product pages to compete with other, similar brands. For example, they use clear descriptions to outline each of their products and fit keywords related into the page. They also list their product names in the URL, headings, and body copy. On top of that, they have informational articles and FAQ sections about their products to increase their visibility in search engines. If you have products on your site, you should focus on ecommerce SEO by integrating key terms throughout the page and be as descriptive as possible.