Are you a beginner in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) journey? You may have just heard that SEO can help your website ranks better in search results and increase website traffic.
So we are here to help you remove your confusion or difficulties about the SEO. Once you have complete knowledge about the fundamentals of SEO, you can discover how to use SEO to increase traffic and generate high-quality leads.
So let’s get into this blog about how Search engine optimisation works.
What is SEO?
Let’s begin by raising a simple question what exactly is SEO?
“Search Engine Optimisation,” or SEO, is the practice of bringing in organic traffic to a website. SEO strategy helps improve your website ranking on SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
To get a deep understanding of this, we have displayed the SEO in Masclow’s hierarchy of SEO needs. This is how people execute the SEO strategy in real life.
What are SEO’s three pillars?
Obtaining your website, business or brand discovered by search engines is a basic skill for digital marketers, and staying up to date with the latest updates in SEO can help you stay successful.
Although Search engine optimisation is evolving in small changes, its key concepts always remain the same. So can break the concepts into 3 components: Technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO
It is the process of enhancing the website performance through technical aspects such as website loading speed, java scripts, easy to crawl the website and help the search engine understand to understand it.
On-page SEO
It means optimising the website’s performance by generating high-quality content and providing a greater user experience. It includes optimizing the targeted keywords in various sectors such as content, meta title, meta description, alt text and so on.
Click this to learn more about that topic in detail: On-page SEO
Off-page SEO
It is the process of building high-quality backlinks to raise the website’s visibility and improve keyword ranking. Which helps your website rank higher and increase the reputation of your business.
Click this to learn more about that topic in detail: OFF-page SEO
How do search engines work?
Whenever people have queries they use search engines to find the solutions online.
Search engines work on the basis of crawling hundreds of pages. This helps to identify the exact search queries by using search engine spiders or bots.
Here are the 3 steps that helps you to understand how the search engine works: crawling, indexing and ranking.
Crawling
The first step of the search engine to identify your website is crawling. It is the process by which web crawlers or bots discover and access your web pages. Those crawlers are also known as search engine spiders or robots.
Crawling helps to identify and record your website information. Those can be your new web pages, periodically alteration of your content or any other information that is related to your website.
Indexing
The second stage of the search engine is indexing. It is the process by which the search engine collects and stores the data in the search engine.
Whenever a web page is crawled the data will be collected in the indexing process.
Ranking
The most important and final stage is ranking. Ranking happens when the web pages are crawled and indexed. Once your pages are crawled and indexed, your pages starts ranking.
Search engine ranks your website based on this relevant structure:
- Relevance: How relevant is your content to the search queries?
- Quality: Quality of your content
- Location: On which location the people are searching (because the ranking changes depending upon the search query location)
- Devices: whether your website is optimised for mobile devices or all other devices.
- Backlinks: The quality and quantity of backlinks helps to higher your website ranking.
Organic and paid results
There are 2 types of results found in SERP: paid and organic results. Basically, the difference between organic and paid results are:
| Organic traffic is free, results are based on the optimisation of content, HTML code, building backlinks and so on. | Paid traffic is generated through paid versions, such as creating through paid ads. |
| Organic traffic is for long-term purposes and the stability of business in the long run. | Paid traffic is used for brand promotion, increase in sales, and website traffic. |
| Organic searches are always shown below the paid results | Paid results are shown at the top or very bottom of search results. It always shows results in the form of sponsored. |
Example:
How does Google order and rank search results?
Google has been evolving its ranking strategies such as Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. These are responsible for ranking your web pages on search engines.
Here are some factors that results in ranking:
- Content quality and freshness: It represents how valuable and freshness of your content (outdated and old content are mostly degrade your ranking)
- Keyword optimization: How well your page is optimised by targeted keywords.
- Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness
What are the benefits of SEO in digital marketing?
Search engine optimization offers various benefits for businesses such as:
- Improved visibility: Whenever customers are looking for products or services seo helps to reach the potential customers easily.
- Increased web traffic: Once your web pages is rank higher in SERP it naturally gains more organic traffic to the website.
- Better ROI: SEO helps for better enhancement in ROI.
- Brand awareness: When a business ranks higher in SERP, more potential customers will reach your website.
- Credibility: SEO helps to gain strong credibility for your business.
- Competitive advantage: SEO helps to outrank your website from your competitors.
- Local marketing: SEO helps to attract the local customers easily
Conclusion:
Search engine optimisation is the key performance for increasing your visibility and generating organic traffic to your website. SEO helps to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERP). It is an ongoing strategy which helps to stabilize your business for a longer period.
