SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Nowadays search engine optimization is very essential and much important to attract more traffic to your website.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search engine optimization is a process of improving your website’s ranking in search results to attract more traffic. We can also say SEO is improving your ranking in search results.
When we search for something on Google the first result in SERP(Search Engine Result Page) has a 28.5% click-through rate and by the time of the 10th result, it has only a 2.5% click-through rate.
Image Source: Search Engine Journal
So we can see how much important it is to place your page or website in the top rank on SERP.
How does a Search Engine work?
Let’s talk about Google. When we search for something in google, it starts to scan its index in real-time and brings us what is the best result for us from billions of indexed pages by calculating an algorithm.
If we break the system we will find 3 processes –
Crawling: It is a process in which search engines crawl to find the best match for the search and bring out the best, newest and updated content. The content could be a webpage, image, video or anything. But will be discovered by its link.
Indexing: Once a page is submitted to a search engine, it stores and index content during the crawling process. Once a page is indexed, it will be displayed as a result of its relevant search.
Difference between storing & Indexing:-.
- Search engines store all the information about a website in their database.
- And every webpage responds to its address or URL which is stored in search engines database and this whole process is called indexing.
Ranking: The search engine will search its indexed contents for the best results, which will answer the search query. The most relevant, organized and authorized content will be ranked at top of the search engine.
How does Google find the best results?
When something is searched in Google, Google starts its algorithm to find the best results for the search query. For that, the first step is to match the keywords related to the search query.
Keywords
If we search for “Best restaurant in New York” Google will only show us some high-rated restaurants located in New York. Because Google will scan its index for the keywords “restaurants” and “New York” and show us the best results related to these keywords.
In this picture, we can see Google is showing us 778 million search results related to our search.
In this picture, we can see google is showing us the most-rated and the best restaurants located in New York.
After searching for the keyword which matches the best to your search, Google will look for the Authority.
Authority
Authority is judged by the number of pages linked to your website. If your website has some backlinks related to your website’s topics, then google will value your website more and give you much more authority. But if your website has lots of backlinks but they are not related or those websites aren’t that trustworthy then Google won’t trust your website either and your authority will be poor. In this way, you won’t be able to rank in a good place on google.
Always try to get backlinks from more worthy and reputed websites. Like if you have a lot of backlinks from some garbage or low-traffic websites that won’t help you much to gain authority from google. Instead, if you have a backlink from websites like “WordPress.org” or “Times”, they will help you to bring more authority to your site. But the more trustworthy links your website has, the higher it will rank.
But your website content and user experience should be smooth and organized. If you have higher authority but your user experience is poor and your content is not organized, google will detect your page as unorganized while crawling and your website will score on the ranking scale. which won’t help you to rank in search engines and get more traffic. On the contrary, if your website is user-friendly and everything is organized then your website is going to do well on the ranking scale although your website has a poor authority. If Google notices that people are really liking your page or website, it will value your page more on SERP ranking.
There are two types of SEO –
1. Organic SEO
2. Inorganic SEO
Organic SEO:
Organic SEO ranks your website without paying anything but only following some techniques and strategies.
Organic search results are ranked based on many factors and algorithms of ranking and the ranking is based on merit.
Inorganic SEO:
Inorganic SEO ranks your website in a search engine by paying that particular search engine.
Inorganic SEO is paid or promoted search results, that we see on the top of the SERP(Search Engine Result Page). In inorganic SEO you have to pay for every visitor and your website will rank based on how much you are willing to pay for a single click. Also known as PPC(Pay Per Click).
In the next part, we will talk more about Organic SEO…..