What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the digital marketing strategy which involves improving website visibility in search engines to drive more traffic to the website. SEO helps the website to increase its credibility to rank higher and drive more qualitative and quantitative traffic.
The tendency of clicking the result on the first page is much higher. So, optimizing the website to rank on the first page on the search term is the key for driving more sales through organic traffic on the website.
Types of SEO:
SEO is broadly classified into multiple types based on the unique strategies and techniques. Some of them are:
- On-Page SEO: It is the process of optimizing individual webpages to rank higher in the search engines driving more traffic. It includes optimizing page titles, H1 tags, headings, and beautifying the content as well as making the content more user friendly in the respective platform. It also involves content optimization and creation of high-quality content.
- Off-Page SEO: Off-Page SEO is any activity that is done outside a webpage that helps to rank the webpage in Search Engine Result Page(SERP) higher. It involves building backlinks, increasing online presence through social media, improving internal linking, analyzing competitors’ backlink profile, fixing dead pages and many more. Off-Page SEO is all about building domain authority and website credibility.
How does Search Engine Optimization work?
SEO works by optimizing the published web pages to rank higher in SERPs with targeted keywords.
1. Publication of Web Pages:
Content must be published on the webpages to get started with SEO. This is where everything begins. Individuals, businesses, and organizations create websites and publish web pages. These web pages could contain a variety of content types, including text, images, videos, and more. The content could be anything from a blog post discussing a recent trip to a product page for an added item in an online store. Once these web pages are published and live on the internet, they become accessible to search engines.
2. Crawling:
Crawling is the process by which search engines discover new web pages. They use automated software agents known as “crawlers” or “spiders”. These crawlers start with a list of web page URLs known as a “seed”. From here, they follow the links on these pages to find other pages. This process of following links allows the crawlers to discover new pages across the vast expanse of the internet. It’s like a giant game of connect-the-dots played on the scale of the entire web.
3. Indexing:
After a page has been crawled, it needs to be indexed. Indexing is the process of analyzing the content of a page and storing it in a way that allows it to be quickly retrieved when needed. The search engine will look at everything on the page, including the text, images, videos, and meta tags. It will try to understand what the page is about and categorize it accordingly. All this information is stored in a giant database known as the “index”.
4. Ranking:
When a user enters a query into a search engine, the search engine needs to decide which pages from its index to show and in what order. This is the process of ranking. The search engine uses a complex algorithm that considers hundreds of factors. These can include the relevance of the page’s content to the query, the reliability and authority of the site, the number of other sites linking to the page, and many more. The goal is to provide the user with the most relevant and high-quality results for their query.
5. Search Results:
The last step is presenting the results to the user. The search engine displays a list of pages from its index that it has ranked as the most relevant to the user’s query. This list is known as the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The SERP may include not only links to web pages but also other types of content that the search engine believes might be helpful, such as images, videos, news articles, and more.
Conclusion:
SEO is a continuous process. Search engines’ algorithms change regularly. So, it is important to stay updated with the latest SEO trends and techniques. Ranking web pages and websites higher in SERPs requires patience and continuous effort. SEO is the secret weapon to profit business driving more traffic and generating more sales. The goal of a search engine is to provide the user with the best possible results for their query. This is why they are constantly crawling and indexing the web, and continually refining their ranking algorithms.
