Search Engines, SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization?

A few years back, SEO was a new term for us, especially for all the business owners and bloggers who have their websites available on the internet. Because it has become important to follow the rules of SEO if you want to make your website rank high on the search engines. But do you know what exactly SEO is, and why it is so important? At present, every webmaster should know the need of SEO, as it can help them in the long run. Let’s see what SEO is and how it is been defined.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, has many definitions at present. For some, SEO is a kind of process which is helping them to improve and increase their website’s visibility on search engines. Whereas some people call SEO, the set of rules, sitemaps, and instructions, that are used for optimizing any website for different search engines and search results, in order to improve their search engine’s ranking. All these forms of SEO definitions are true, and this is one of the reasons why people are focusing so much on SEO. For those, who know well about the SEO and the guidelines related to it, they are taking their businesses to another level with the help of their website.

SEO is not just a simple process but there is a complete framework behind it. From identifying the right keywords that can help in getting your website the target audience traffic to placing those keywords at the right place, and then helping your website in the ranking, SEO do all of these things.

3 Main Components of SEO

When it comes to important components or important stages of SEO, there are 3 main stages. They are:

  • On-Site SEO – This stage comprises of all the processes, rules, and guidelines, that are necessary for the website. As this helps in making the website or the content available on the website search engine friendly.
  • Technical SEO – It is very important to have the right technical SEO if you want your website to be crawled by the search engines. Also, it helps in indexing your website smoothly, after the crawling process, without any problem.
  • Off-Site SEO – This is related to marketing and promotion of the blog or the website. This helps in increasing the visibility of the website and it also improves the rank of the website in search engine result pages.

Importance of Search Engine Optimization

For a better understanding of what Search Engine Optimization is doing, one needs to understand its importance as well. There are a lot of great SEO resources online. For now, let’s look at why SEO is important for websites and businesses.

  • Increases the Traffic – SEO has helped businesses a lot in terms of getting the traffic and the quality users on their website. As when a user searches something on the search engine, they click on the high-ranking websites that are on the first page. So, if your keywords are right and are matching the user’s search query, you will more likely to get the traffic on the website.
  • Increases Credibility – When search engine results page places any website on the top, again and again, this increases the trust in the mind of users. Most of the users prefer to check the websites that are listed on the top or that are on the 1st page of the search engine results page. As they know that these are some of the best websites. If your website will rank higher, it will increase its credibility.
  • Knowing your Customers in a better way – With the help of the keywords and SEO, you can surely get to know more about your customers. By checking which keywords are making your website rank high and which keywords are bringing more traffic to your website, you can know a lot about your customers. Like their interests, demographics, location, decision-making habits, purchase habits, and other such things. This will not just help you in knowing your customers in a better way but will also help you in improving your business and products according to the customer’s requirement.
  • Increases Visibility – There is no difficulty in understanding how SEO can help in increasing your website’s or your business visibility. The higher your website ranks on the search engine result page and with the greater number of keywords your business ranks with, the greater the number of users will visit your website. This will help in bringing potential customers to your website by making your brand visible in front of them.
  • Better form of Marketing – When users search for something related to your industry or business with the help of the keywords, they land into your website with the help of search results. So, if your SEO is placed right, you will get more users, and this will increase the marketing of all the products and services that you have listed on your website. For instance when I searched for a music related site, I found freshone. Also, it is said to be one of the cost-effective ways of marketing, in comparison with the other marketing techniques.
Search Engines, SEO

How Do Search Engines Work?

At present, we all are using search engines on a regular basis. If we have a URL of the website, we can directly reach to the website. But what if we do not have the URL, in that case, we will have to make use of the search engines for getting the desired information. That information can be in the form of an image, a pdf file, videos, and the website. One of the most popular search engines which we all are using at present is Google Search Engine. These search engines have made things easier for us as we can search for anything online with ease. But have you ever wondered how these search engines work? Or how they provide us the searches based on our queries?

These days, almost every business is online, as it is important for the growth of the business. And all these businesses also depend highly on these search engines, be it an E-commerce business, or any consulting firm business, or the blogger, and vloggers, they all need these search engines. We do understand that it is a bit confusing for you all to understand the complete algorithm of how search engines work. But you should be aware of the basics of how a search engine works, as all the search engines work on almost the same algorithm. So, let’s understand a few basic things about the search engines and how they work and give us all the searches.

The search engine basically works on three functions. The three functions are crawling, indexing, and algorithm. These are the basic functions on which a search engine is dependent. However, other than these 3 basic functions, there is a lot that is required for getting the search results.

Crawling

The first step in the process of how a search engine works is known as Crawling. Crawling is a kind of process for searching or discovering. In this process, the search engines, make use of spiders or crawlers or the search engine robots to find the latest, updated, and relevant content. When a user searches something on the search engine, the crawler helps in finding out the content that is being published on the web to provide the user with the relevant search result. The web crawler or the spiders crawl a web page repeatedly to check if there is any new or updated information available. Web Crawlers gathers all the link they get on the page and keeps performing the task. You will be surprised to know that these web crawlers can read more than 100 or 1000 pages per second.

Indexing

The web crawler when crawls all the web pages, it stores the copy that is made during the crawling process in the data center. There are many data centers around the world and every search engine has dozens of data centers. These search engines guard their data center very properly. These data centers are very huge and they store all the copies of those webpages which the crawlers have made. In simple words, we can say that the Indexing is basically related to storing of the content along with organizing the content which a crawler found during the crawling process. And these contents are the webpages copies which the crawlers have read n number of times. The content that is stored in the index is nothing but the result of the query that has been made by the user and it will be displayed by the search engine. Indexing is basically done for the purpose of displaying the search results quickly for the search query that is been made. And there are not just a few contents that are stored in the data center during indexing, there is a huge content that is being stored and organized during this process.

Algorithm

Many people also call this function of the search engine as ranking. So, the algorithm is not a very simple process, and it is a lengthy process. As the crawling and indexing is done, and the search engines have huge copies of web pages, so these search engines need to display the relevant result in the order. When we say that they need to be displayed in order, we mean that these copies of web pages should be ranked in proper order according to the search query made by the user. You all would have heard about the term Search Engine Optimization, and this plays a very crucial role in the algorithm process. This is one of the reasons why most of the sites these days are focusing a lot on improving SEO. It is believed that the higher a web page is placed or is ranked in the search engine for the search query that was made, the more relevant it is according to the query. The better the algorithm will be of any search engine, the more relevant result they will provide of the search query.…