What is SEO? Let’s go into it.
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization, which is how websites’ content relevance, technical configuration, and link popularity are optimized. The goal is to make a site more relevant, popular, and findable when users perform searches.
Google and the other major search engines recommend efforts that benefit a page’s ranking and the user experience by offering content that answers users’ questions. This includes using keywords in meta descriptions, titles, and headlines, descriptive URLs, and employing other best practices. In this beginners’ guide, you’ll learn the fundamentals of SEO.
How the Search Engines Work
When search terms are entered, the search engine’s algorithm decides which of the thousands of search results are most relevant. Then, it lists those sites, considering their popularity, relevance, and other ranking factors, before showing them on a SERP or search engine results page.
Crawling the Web
Google and the other search engines are always looking for page updates. Using programs called crawlers, which follow web links, they report that information to their servers. That’s why it’s important to make your pages accessible to the crawlers and to include internal links that make it easy to navigate the site. Technical SEO will help you configure a site for optimal crawlability.
Site Indexing
When web crawlers obtain information about a site, internal servers analyze every page’s content to discover what they’re about. If Google believes that a page’s information is useful enough to be included in search results, it will index that info, keeping it ready for when users search for relevant topics.
SEO Ranking
When a user searches, Google decides which pages they see first. The following factors are considered:
- The words the user included in their query
- User location
- The page’s expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and relevance
- The web page’s link popularity
- The page’s mobile-friendliness and speed
An ongoing SEO challenge is to ensure that a site’s pages outperform others that focus on similar topics, so it can rank higher in the SERPs, no matter how algorithms change.
How to Rank Higher
Since the advent of the internet, search engines have utilized algorithms to decide which sites appear first on results pages. The things the algorithms focus on, however, have changed significantly. Since the dim, dead days of keyword stuffing, the search engines have learned what makes sites informative and relevant. They apply this new knowledge periodically as updates are released.
Site quality is judged according to:
- Relevance to the user’s search terms
- The site’s expertise and reliability
- Site usability
Some factors are on the page, which means they affect how a website is experienced. Others are off the page, such as other sites and their links to yours. Off-page components make sites more reputable and popular, which increases their ranking.
In Closing
Now that you’re a little more familiar with search engine optimization, you can improve a site’s visibility and ranking. It’s simple to get started! By offering valuable content and optimizing your site’s technical aspects, you’ll achieve the results you want.
