What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the technique of improving a website to increase its visibility when clients search for products or services. The more a website is visible to the world the more chances are that the business will get clients. Website visibility is mostly counted as the ranking or placement of website on search engine results, where everyone is competing to be on first page.
If we take Google in consideration, in the search engine results page ads are placed in top followed by regular search results which are called organic search results. The SEO process aims to increase the organic search result of a business that will increase organic search traffic to the site.
Organic search traffic is normally high-quality traffic because users are actively searching for a specific product, topic or service for which a site might rank. If a user finds that site via the search engine, it will lead to better brand engagement.
How SEO works
Search engine uses bots to crawl every page of a website, downloading and storing that information into a collection is known as an index. The index is like a library and when someone searches for something, The search engine pulls and displays relevant information from the search query and shows users relevant contents. Search engine algorithms analyze webpages in the index to determine the order those pages should be displayed on the search engine results page.
Which factors are evaluated by Algorithms There are a lot of factors that are evaluated by algorithms to specify which contents from index are displayed in Search engine results page but most important factors are
1. Meaning of the query
To return results that are relevant a search engine must first understand what the user is looking for which is called intent. To understand user intent a search engine is looking to understand language, interpreting spelling mistakes, and that some words can mean different in different context
2. Relevance of webpages
The search engine will check the content of website and find out if they are relevant to what the user intended. This can be determined if the webpage contains keywords included in the search. These keywords can be in headings, Body or even URL of the webpage.
3. Quality of the content
Search engines will prioritize the contents based on the quality of the website. The intelligence in the search engines determines which websites are more trustworthy so they can be ranked higher
4. Usability of webpages
Accessibility and Web design play a big part in search rankings. The algorithm checks how the site appears in different browsers, if it’s responsive (designed for different device types — such as desktops, tablets and phones) and if the web page loads fast for slow connection
5. Context and settings
Search engines algorithms use information from previous search history and search settings to determine which results are most useful to a users. Location can be used to determine which results are accurate based on the user. For example someone searching for cricket in Australia will get different results than a user searching the same in united states.
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