SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the process of optimizing your website in a way that search engines like Google show your webpages on the top for a particular search query. Broadly speaking, you can optimize for SEO by optimizing the following three areas:
1. Your website.
Your ranking will depend largely on how good your website is in terms of the user-experience and overall optimization.
It needs to be optimized for crawlers while also be mobile-friendly. Apart from that, the page speed and heading tags need to be optimized as well.
2. Your content.
The content on your website needs to stand out and need to address the most popular topics in your niche. Your focus should also be towards the content’s readability and its ability to attract attention.
3. What people in your community are saying about you.
Finally, you need to ensure that you have a positive image on all online platforms where you site appears. This helps you with your off-page SEO, link building, reviews, and social media.
All these factors are taken into consideration by the search engines which decide when and where to show your website to users.
If you’re interested in learning more about the basics of SEO, then check out our SEO 101 video series.
How Google search works:
Google uses little programs called bots or crawlers that discover webpages. These crawlers start with a few pages, find backlinks on those pages and visit those links, discover backlinks on those pages and visit them, until Google has crawled trillions of pages.
Those pages are stored in Google’s database, which is what we call the Google index.
Whenever there is a search, Google uses its algorithm to determine which pages from its index it should show, and in what order which is called ranking.
Some ranking factors have been publicly identified by Google, some have been identified by top SEO professionals through studies and proven experience, and some are just educated guesses.
Search engine optimization is all about improving your rankings so that you show up at the top of search results for your target keywords.
SEO is a core component of digital marketing. It helps build a website’s authority and drives organic traffic to your site. Even though paid ads appear above organic rankings, 71% of searches result in a click on an organic result on the first page.
Organic results are trusted more by people, and are seen as a neutral vote of confidence by Google.
Moreover, it can pay long term dividends. With paid ads, your page will disappear the moment the ad campaign stops. That’s not the case with organic results since they’ll stay there at the top as long as Google considers that you’re website is the best source of information for the user.
