What is SEO And How Does It Work?

What is SEO?
SEO is an abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, which is a Digital Marketing technique in order to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. SEO is important to attract high quality visitors from search and also is a way to improve the user-friendliness of your website in a way increasing its credibility to the Search Engines. These Search engines are using complex algorithms to determine which pages from your website to include in their index and the chronology they show these pages in the search results. In short, SEO is the way to ‘speak’ to search engines in a language they can understand and give them more information about your website, which will help them show the right webpage to the right person searching for you or your products. SEO can be done in 2 ways on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. Some factors that determine your page rank for On-page SEO are: Page quality, Keywords, Relevancy, Page Structure, URL Structure, Internal Linking, Page Performance, etc. On the other hand Off-page SEO refers to activities you can perform outside the boundaries of your website. Some factors that determine your page rank for Off-page SEO are: Backlinks, Domain Authority, Relevance of links, etc. A blend of both these would give you optimal results.

 Some SEO technical terminologies you need to know before we jump onto how it works:

•Search Engine is a program that will search and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user. It is widely used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web. E.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc

•Bot refers to a program that performs a task autonomously. Robots, spiders or crawlers are the most commonly used bots by the Search engines to find and add sites to their search index list.

•Algorithm is a program utilized by the search engines to determine what pages and sites to suggest when a user enters a search query. 

•Backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your website, the higher the rank your website will posses.

•Bounce rate is the percentage of users who enter a site and immediately leave without clicking on additional pages on the site is referred to as “bounce rate,” meaning the rate at which users will bounce in and out of your site. The lesser the bounce rate the better ranked is your website or webpage by the search engines.

How does SEO work: 
The next question that comes to your mind is, how do I optimise my website? Here is the key, Optimizing a website may involve editing your website content, adding some informative content, modifying your website HTML tags, and associated coding to not only increase its relevance to specific keywords but also to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. 

The search engines follow a 3 layer process in order to grant you a well deserved ranking on their results page. Let us dive deep into each of these processes.

 Find Information by Crawling:
Crawling is the discovery process where the search engine sends out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content on the web. Content can be in any format, it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, etc. A search Engine as big Google would send out Googlebot who are out there fetching for few old or new webpages, and then follows the links on those webpages to find new URLs. By hopping from one page to another along this path of links, the crawler is able to find new content and add it to their index called Caffeine (a massive database of newly discovered URLs on the web). These URLs can later be retrieved by the search engine when a searcher is seeking information making sure the content on that URL is a great match to the visitors need.

 Organize data with Indexing:
Indexing is a process of adding web pages into google search. This is similar to having a book with an index which gives a list of important topics/terms covered in the book. The only differentiation here is Google instead of listing topics and terms lists down websites/web pages newly discovered. Let’s spend a couple of minutes to understand how indexing works? When Google crawlers (known as Googlebot) detect any site, it checks new and  updated pages and submits them to the Google Indexer. These pages are stored in an Index format which then becomes Google’s database. This Index is organised where it is alphabetically sorted by the search terms, with each new entry on the page is stored in a list of documents in which the term appears and the location of the term in that particular webpage. While indexing search terms, Google ignores common words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why. when etc), certain single digits, single letters, Punctuation and Multiple Spaces. Therefore, Indexing is a data organising process, which helps Google to show results quickly and accurately to a visitor looking for specific information.

Ranking on results page:
Ranking refers to your content’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). When you receive a #1 ranking it means that when people search for a particular term that your website has, your web page is the first result they will see. It is said that appearing in the top 3 results is an excellent achievement because study shows a visitor will click maximum 3 links for information. How do you think Google does this? Algorithms, your right. Algorithms are ever changing and hence no SEO professional can guarantee you a rank1 position throughout your business time. What do you think these algorithms are based on? Let’s look at some critical factors that these algorithms follow in order to give you a well deserved ranking. 

A secure and an accessible website, Page speed, Mobile friendly, Domain age, Domain URL, Domain Authority, Relevant content, User inference, Links (Backlinks and internal links),Social signals and connect, etc are the critical factors one most consider for Website optimisation.

iDigitize is one of the best SEO Agency in Mumbai  where the SEO team strives to attain set targets and delivers timely results to our prestigious clients. 

Reference Source:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-search-engines-operate