SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and means making a website better for search engines. Basically, SEO refers to a bunch of methods that help boost the number of visitors to a website and improve its ranking on the results page of major search engines like Google. By using SEO techniques, you can:
- Designed and built a website that ranks well in search engine results.
- Boosted the number of visitors (and traffic) coming to the website from different search engines.
- Got into modern marketing and e-commerce by understanding how search algorithms work and what real users actually search for.
SEO is a part of search engine marketing (SEM), which itself is considered a branch of internet marketing. This method helps increase visibility in search engine results pages. It works through optimization and advertising. Search engine marketing might involve using SEO to tweak and rewrite website content to get higher rankings on search engines, or it might be done through pay-per-click. SEO is also called SEO copywriting, since most of the techniques used to improve how visible a site is in search results and how high it ranks have to do with text and writing.
To implement SEO easily, you need to be familiar with how search engines work and how their algorithms function.
How does a search engine work?
Search engines perform the following steps to deliver search results:
- Crawling (checking and collecting all the info and content from a site) : This is the process of fetching all the linked and connected pages of a website. It’s done by a web-crawling software called a crawler or spider (Google uses Googlebot). It answers questions like: Can the search engine find and recognize your site?
- Indexing (tagging, listing, and saving site info) : This is the process of creating an index for all the fetched web pages and storing them for future access in a big database. Basically, indexing means figuring out the words and phrases that best describe the page and linking the page to specific keywords. In indexing, you can ask questions like: Can the search engine index your site’s info and keep it in its database?
- Processing (handling the request) : When a new request comes in, the search engine processes it. That means it compares the search query in the request with the indexed and stored pages in its database.
- Calculating Relevance : The search string might show up on more than one page, so the search engine checks how relevant the indexed pages (all the pages in its index) are to the search string.
- Retrieving Results : The last step a search engine takes to show relevant results is pulling up the pages that match the search term the most. At this point, the search engine just shows the matching results in the browser page.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo usually change their relevance algorithms multiple times each month. So if you notice a change in your site’s ranking in search results, it might be because of updates made to those algorithms. Even though almost all search engines work based on the same core principle, small differences in their relevance algorithms can lead to major differences in the results relevance that gets shown.
What is SEO copywriting?
The method or technique of writing text on website pages in a way that makes them easily visible is called SEO copywriting. These texts should be easy for web surfers to read and should target specific search keywords. The purpose of using this technique is to improve the ranking of the site or its pages in search engine results for the searched words.
Besides improving how visible a site is in search engine results, SEO copywriting often optimizes other elements on the pages for the search terms. These elements can include the title tag, description tag, keyword tags, headings, and alt text.
The idea behind this technique is that search engines want pages with original and matching content, and they don’t need extra or unrelated pages that are just made to get high rankings—these are called "doorway pages".
What is search engine rank?
When you search for a keyword using a search engine, it shows thousands of related results from its database in the browser page. A page’s rank is basically measured by its position in the search engine results. If a search engine puts your site’s page in the first spot, then your site’s rank is considered 1, meaning that web page has the highest rank. As for the connection between SEO and site rank, SEO is the process of designing and developing web pages to get a high rank in search engine results.
What is on-page and off-page SEO?
Conceptually, there are two methods for optimizing a website:
- On-Page SEO : This method includes providing good content, choosing the right keywords, placing the keywords in the right spots, giving each page a relevant and proper title, and so on.
- Off-page SEO : This method includes building links, boosting link popularity by submitting them to open directories, search engines, and doing link exchanges, and so on.