Let's take for example an instance to understand how SEO works better. When someone searches the question- ‘What is SEO?’ on the search engine, they are provided with nearly 92,60,00,000+ search results.
The first page itself has around ten articles that answer the question. How did these sites land their articles on the first page?
The sites are not on the first page due to luck. They won't disappear when you hit the refresh button. Every time you type the above question, those sites will be on the same page. By implementing the appropriate SEO practices into their content, many blog posts and websites rank higher on the search engine results page, as compared to the others. The Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP) is responsible for the consistent flow of organic traffic on a website, thereby helping the brand grow and increase sales.
Having in-depth knowledge about SEO and SEO optimization techniques helps content creators, brands, and small businesses generate revenue faster and more efficiently. Let's delve deeper into the significance of SEO as a must-have skill as well as in growing your business online.
The age and validity of content depend on its relevance to the topic and the audience. Being primarily focused on implementing proper usage of keywords, articles that have been optimized with SEO practices can help them rank higher in the search engine consistently.
While the primary aspect of SEO may be keywords, the quality of content, URL structure, the flow of content, graphics, user convenience, and experience are equally important for natural search engine ranking, boosting the website engagement, and consistently attracting more traffic.
That said, SEO requires regular efforts, which means that the implementation of SEO should be thoroughly strategized with a clear idea about the objectives and expected results, over a course of 6-12 months.
SEO is the process of making content rank higher on the search engine results page. In the past few years, Google has become synonymous with the term ‘search’. We constantly refer to Googling something when we mean to search for a particular topic.
Taking Google’s popularity into consideration, there are still more than 20 web search engines to choose from. So why Google?
Google became the top search engine when it changed its SEO criteria and requirements for digital marketers and content creators. Google also changed its algorithms which made searching for a particular keyword easier and more relevant to what the searcher needs. The rankings of the page are in accordance with the SEO rules that are followed by Google’s algorithms and search style.
However, besides Google, other popular search engines are:
The SEO optimization practices that you need to follow will depend on the type of search engine that you want to rank higher in. it becomes a difficult task to make a single content be optimized for multiple search engines for each engine has its own algorithm and SERP requirements. But, SEO optimization for more than one search engine is possible when the basics are followed.
Search engine algorithms are unique formulas that help search engines retrieve keyword specific data, that is stored in a data structure and show it to the user. Algorithms are significant to search engines and online content since they determine the importance of a webpage and its content.
While all search engines have their unique algorithms, they all share some basic guidelines to work towards a single objective which is to provide data to the user according to the term searched.
In order to provide the answer, all search engines work through these three common steps:
The process of ‘Crawling’ includes specific bots or search engine crawlers checking all the information on the web pages to find the relevant topics based on the keyword. Besides basic content and keyword optimization, factors such as layout, graphics, website experience and page linking are also taken into consideration. These software bots crawl through all the pages to sort out the most relevant content.
The indexing process refers to saving, organizing and storing pages with similar keywords together, that the bots or ‘crawlers’ come across during the initial process of search engine crawling.
Suppose the search made includes the words travel, cafe, and bike. While crawling, all relevant articles and content pieces include those words. Once these pages are found, they are indexed while the crawlers keep searching for more content.
Once the crawlers have found and indexed the keyword specific articles, and no more pieces of content can be found, the pages are displayed on the search engine results page. Here, the priority is given to the relevance of the pages have in terms of the keywords used for searching. This is where the search engines begin to differ from each other.
Since each search engine has its own algorithm, they all work on identifying the keywords and keyphrases while conducting the search. However, contrary to the unpopular belief that keyword stuffing helps in better ranking, search engines often detect this, which affects the ranking negatively.
The basis of all Search Engine Optimisation rankings relies on organic search. In terms of understanding the basics of SEO, it is essential to understand the main components that drive the functioning of SEO. For pages that want to increase their online visibility, they need to follow the basic components of SEO, and these include: