How Does SEO Work
You must have come across the term SEO from a web designer when designing your website or having a discussion with the web developer.
The search engines do not randomly pick this page out of the sky and send you here hoping it would answer how Search engine optimization works. In fact, it uses a very complex algorithm to determine which of the more than millions of pages that it has indexed would be most appropriate to present to you in hopes of best answering your search query.
Search engines work to consistently deliver you the high quality relevant results for your search queries and begin to gain your trust and become your most sought after search engine.
Let us know how SEO works, but first of all we know what SEO is. About SEO facts. Why and where do we use SEO?
What is SEO?
SEO is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on your website’s presence in the search results on search engines.
SEO is the acronym that stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of making your website easier to find at the top of relevant search results of various search engines like Google, Yandex, Bing, Baidu and much more. For example if you own an auto parts shop in Sydney, Brisbane, SEO can help potential customers find your business when they search “auto parts shop in Sydney”.
When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics to enhance your visibility online or to achieve high rank in the search results.
Let’s categorize SEO strategies in two tasks:
- On-page SEO: These strategies happen on your website
- Off-page SEO: They are the SEO strategies that happen off your website.
Both the aforesaid strategies aim to make your website more friendly, as well as trustworthy to the users and search engines. When the search engine bots or crawlers find that your website is friendly to them and users, it enhances the chances your site will rank well for different searches.
What makes your website search engine friendly?
Search engines view websites in a totally different manner than humans do. A SEO friendly website will have all or most of the following:
- Valid coding
- Effective and accurate page titles
- Headings
- Unique and quality content
- Links
- Meta tags
- Alt tags
- CSS-based design
A website designed by keeping aforesaid points in mind, will have a strong base for Search engine optimization efforts. SEO is an ongoing process and includes link building and continued development of quality content.
Case study example for clear explanation:
For example you have two website – Website A and Website B
Website A is not responsive, which means users on tablets or smartphones will find it tough to navigate and use the site. Website B; however is responsive, which means a better user experience for all smart phones, tablet, and desktop users. For search engines, it is an easy decision which website is more- friendly: Website A
How do search engines work?
Search engine work through following primary functions:
- Crawling and Indexing
- Robots.txt
- Algorithms
- Website design and coding
- Content
- Backlinks
Let’s look at each of the above function in detail:
Crawling and Indexing: Crawling is the process performed by the search engines where it uses their web crawlers to perceive any new links, any new website or landing pages, any changes to current data and many more. The web crawlers also known as bots or spiders visit the website, then follow the internal links through which they can crawl other pages of the site as well. Creating a site map is one of the key reasons to make it easier for search engine crawlers to crawl the website. The sitemap contains vital lists of URLs. Crawling the entire website at once is not possible and would take a lot of time. Due to which the search engine crawlers can crawl only the critical parts of the site and measure the individual statistics that would help in ranking of the website.
Website indexing plays a vital role while displaying all the key pages on the SERPs. If any content is not visible to the search engine robots, it will not be indexed. The search engine robot sees the complete website in different formats like HTML, CSS and Javascript format. The components that are not accessible will not be indexed.
So how do search engines decide what to index?
When a user types the query; the search engine attempts to obtain the most relevant answer from its crawled pages in the database. The search engines index the content according to their defined algorithms. They usually index the fresh content on the website, which they believe improves the user experience. The better quality of content and links on the website is, the better it is for SEO.
Robots.txt: A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which pages and files the crawler can or cannot request to access on your site. Robots.txt is primarily used to instruct and manage crawler traffic. You can tell the search engine crawler not to crawl less helpful content such as search result pages or login pages. Here are some of the things that the SEO experts take into account when dealing with robots.txt:
- Place the robots.txt in your root directory of your website and never they will place in the sub directory
- Never block a search engine from crawling the page for it is like removing the page from the index. Using disallow does not guarantee that a page will not appear within the index or search results. In case if one would like to block a specific page from getting crawled or indexed, then you should use the no index robots meta tag instead of disallowing it in the robots.txt.
- The SEO experts review your robots.txt often or review URLs disallowed by robots.txt in the webmaster tools to make sure it remains accurate.
Algorithms: Algorithms follow some basic definition and rule. Algorithms help the search engines to decide which results to show to the users based on the keywords types in the search engine. Search engines have complex algorithms for serving search results and it makes frequent changes. Some of the characteristics that algorithms of search engine explores when determining how to deliver and rank pages are:
- Appearance of keywords in the page title header tags and meta description.
- The amount of naturally occurring, organic links to the page.
- The way your website is responsive to various devices like tablets and smartphones.
Website design: Your website design affects the SEO rankings. Website design affects user experience but it also affects the search engine rankings. Poor website design practices lower your SEO rank, showing your site lower in the search. Search engine optimized website on the basis of following metrics:
- Good load times, easy to read texts and updated site designs
- Quality content with amazing visuals
- Make easy for crawlers to index your site
- Simple and clean navigation site
- Limit flash and Javascript
- Readability
- Responsive design
It is imperative to design the website that appeals to humans and to the search engine crawlers as well to get high returns. To know more click how to create a website.
Content: Content should be on the priority when thinking about SEO. Quality and unique content is how you engage, inform, support and captivate your audiences. Authentic and relevant content is critical for search engine visibility. Here are some of the basic parameters for content to be search engine friendly:
- Quality content
- Unique
- Relevant keywords
- Informative
- Easy to read
Backlinks: Backlinks are important for SEO because they signal to the search engines that another resource finds your content valuable enough to link to it within their own content. As a website earns additional back links, search engines infer that the website possesses valuable content worth ranking as well on the SERPs.
Let us now consider how different leading search engines work:
Google: Google is one of the major search engines and is used in many parts of the world. It is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as web crawlers that explore the web on a frequent basis to find the sites to add to our index. The Google search works in 3 stages:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Serving search results
Bing: Bing rewards the websites that put their location details on prominent display. Bing’s algorithm considers information from third party sources, like social media platforms like Facebook. It is important to make sure that you are ranking local search engines of Facebook too to optimize your Bing SEO. Here are certain ranking factors relevance for Bing SEO:
- Relevance
- Credibility and quality of the page
- User engagement and satisfaction
- Uniqueness
- Location
- Page load time
Baidu: Baidu, just like Google, takes into account many things when weeding out bad content from the good. Here’s how Baidu works for SEO:
- Using Chinese language is important
- Keywords play the major role
- Focus on domains and hosting
- Semantic search
- Leverage with Baidu’s other products like Baike to improve the SEO.
Yandex: Yandex, the Russian search engine has a number of algorithms that ensure users are met with quality, useful content in sync with their search. Here’s Yandex SEO in a nut-shell:
- Yandex highly optimizes geo-targeted searches
- User engagement
- Content
- Domain age
- Commercial factors
- Meta tags
- Backlinks
- Mobile friendliness
- Indexing time
So why on earth search engines care about SEO?
Why do any search engine ever care about whether you use them or not, after all you do not pay them. Yes, you are not paying them but someone else is. So the answer to the question is they care because they are making money from advertising.
The SERPs page delivered to you by the search engines after you enter your search query presents you with organic results and pay-per-click ads. The organic results are those that are influenced by SEO, while the PPC adverts are paid one. The search engines make their money with the PPC adverts on their page. So, the better the results they deliver you, the more likely you and others use that search engine again. The more people use the search engine, the more ads they get and the more money they can make.
Why should you care about SEO?
This is a million dollar question that should be of your interest. As a website owner you want huge traffic to your website. As per research and given the common tendency of humans, people click the sites that appear among the top rankings of the major SERPs. They ignore or do not bother to even consider the pages that are ranked below. In other words if you are not ranked among the top ranking lists of SERPs, your site is not in the list of your target audience and they may not even bother to click your website. Having low ranks in the ranking pages of search engines is like not in existence to your web audience.
It is therefore important that you should optimize your website for good SERPs rankings so that your website not only has a robust online presence but also gets huge relevant traffic.
A technical explanation of how SEO works!
Now you know how different search engines work and why they work so hard to provide you with great search results. Now let us discuss the technicalities of how SEO works?
Search engines have spiders – an automated robot kind. These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages and make up your site. This allows them to determine when to deliver a page of your site to the searcher. They collect things like speed of the page, title tags, internal links, backlinks and so on.
Every search engine has its own rankings factors in their algorithm and they index your site accordingly. When it comes to optimizing your website, you need to consider a lot of things. They are on-page optimization and off-page optimization ranking factors. These factors determine how well your site ranks.
The on-page factors are the things that are on the page. This includes title tags, content, internal links, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags and more. Off-page factors are totally based on links to your site from other sites.
The search engine bots are automated computer programs and they cannot access the website like humans. They crawl the code of the website. This means they cannot see images or videos nor are they impressed by captivating designs or audio clips. Furthermore they cannot even understand the content like we humans do!
Now make the SEO work for you!
Now that you know how SEO works and what are the various factors taken into account by different search engines for indexing and ranking your website, so now make the SEO work for you!
Optimizing the website for search engines is certainly an arduous task by any means. An experienced SEO expert will help you out in this challenging task.
Arihant Webtech is an SEO company in Delhi that has years of fruitful experience and expertise in optimizing the websites for its clients of varied industry verticals. We have worked to make the websites of our clients more attractive to search engines. Whether you are new to SEO or want to take your optimization to a whole new level? Our talented SEO team is waiting and eager to help you out!
We are just a call or mail away! You can get in touch with our SEO team and discuss optimizing your website for search engines. We are ready with a customized SEO plan aligned with your requirements. So let’s get going and embark on a new journey in the SEO world together.
