What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the method or art of increasing the ranking of websites in search engines, in the results it generates and getting the maximum number of relevant traffic directed to one’s website, that is why we called it optimization.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the most important part in Digital Marketing, If you want to learn Digital Marketing Read the Top 10 Digital Marketing Blogs.
It includes a more than anybody would have guessed, from the way that a site is designed, the process where it connects to other websites and the keywords words used in the main content of the website.
It is now clear that if the website appears on upper level of the search engines result page it will get better traffic from the visitors who visit on that search engine.
The next key point to increase traffic is repeating the appearance on the search results page, or how many times a that page of the website appears on a search engine’s results page. The main objective of search engine optimization is to increase both these factors of appearance to get a better traffic to the website from the search engine.
Search engines have internet bots or it is also known as ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’ to index the websites on the internet and keep their indexed pages on that particular platform.
This entire process is called indexing or crawling or in an easy way, we can term it as reading and enlisting websites on the world wide web.
To help those spiders or crawlers, algorithms are written for the generation of results from the indexed pages which is crawled by the spiders.
The search engine optimization is all about the way or the process of making websites easy to indexed for search engines spiders and made very responsive to the algorithms of search engine.
Always keep in mind that SEO or Search engine optimization is getting better results for organic or natural search results that search engine provides for the website.
Organic search results are the ones that are not obtained by paying the search engine as it is based on paid or sponsored results where different methodologies or techniques involved that is known as search engine marketing.
Before we learn about how to use SEO methods to get the results for a website, let’s learn about one more important factor that is-
Why do we need to do SEO for a website?
Why it matters?
Although it is very important to generate traffic, get noticed and create interest for the website by using social media platforms, by paying on ads and other methods to gain traffic for the website from the visitors, search engines are the foundation of every websites visibility and publicity.
This is because of two main reasons.
First is search engines are the actual way from where maximum traffic flows and gets its destinations.
According to the survey by Forbes during 2013 year 40% of internet traffic made by Google alone.
So it basically means that if a website is not compatible with the search engine, it will miss out the majority of the traffic that is found on the internet.
Second reason is, the most important task of search engine is to generate and send targeted traffic to your website in easy words, visitors or users who are looking for exactly what a certain website has offering.
This targeted traffic of visitors, that search engines send to the website, are essential element of success on the internet and the growth of a website, so that it’s the only main source of publicity, exposure that no platform of marketing can gives you.
Thus, working in SEO is most important to gain maximum results.
Understanding Search Engines
How do search engines work?
Although it is not possible to imagine the internet without search engine because basically search engines are the navigation part of the internet. It works as a navigator.
Due to this huge amount or depth of the world wide web, the websites which provides flawless information becomes worthless without search engine.
Search engines involves in following tasks:
1) Search engines explores the world wide web by using specific words or phrases it is basically known as keywords.
2) Search engines index the pages or results when they find it.
3) Search engines give a user access to that index results and they search it using combination of words or phrases.
We can’t even imagine that up to ten million questions or queries performed every day by search engines and it is constantly evolving and inventing its performance to balance the requirements of users, advertisers and websites.
It starts with spiders or crawlers are composed of software or coding. Just like the spider crawls, search engines spiders do the same thing and make a listing of what they found and where they found on the internet.
It all starts with something called spiders (also called crawlers) and how appropriate,having in mind that the internet is called the World Wide Web.
Crawling is the process of browsing, indexing and collecting copies performed by spiders. Pretty much like a real spider the search engines spiders crawl to every link they found on that website or server
Interesting fact: Google started out with just four spiders who would read 600 kilobytes per second, a sarcastic figure if we assume it for today. This makes us to think how much the World Wide Web has expanded.
Although you will be amazed to know that Google was the first to come up with spiders, their use has spread across the search engine land and search for newer, faster and more creative spiders is always on.
Search engine spiders indexes everything they read also meta tags which are the discription of the certain keywords or phrases which the website makers would want their website to be indexed.
It helps the spiders to understand about the page and where it is indexed.
They help the spiders understand what the page is about and where it belongs in an index.
Webmasters can use keywords or descriptions in the metatags which are inappropriate or reference popular
topics and keywords which their site
might not relevant with.
For this purpose, spiders are developed to correlate the metatags with the content found on the website and come up with their own understanding of where the page belongs on an index.
The next big factor of search engine is the algorithms
The next big organ in the anatomy of a search engine is the algorithms.
Algorithms are computer coding or rather software that is developed to take the keywords you write into the search bar of the browser and provide with the most relevant results from the indexes that the spiders have made in its system.
They are like answer givers that behaves like a robotic machine.
They depend on signals or hints from the websites that are indexed to come up with rankings of search results.
These signals vary from content to content that means how fresh the content on a website is, to how much visitors it has been visited recently and the reason that the visitor asking the query belongs to.
When you press search button on your desktop algorithms of that search engine creates signals for search lists, google alone uses almost more than 200 kinds of signals to help algorithm.
How do people interact with search engines?
Before you begin to make a product
The main purpose of designing or making any kind of product or service is to know and understand how the real user is going to use that product or service.
The best way to design a beautiful home interior design is to know and understand the people how they gonna interact.
The same thing is concerned with the SEO,
If someone designing a marketing campaign which will be around SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) it would definitely begins with the fine sense of understanding how people interact with the search engines.
If you know what exactly users want, you can give what they want, and if they are already getting and how much you need to improve it.
Search engine facts and figures
If we want to understand where we stand now, we need to understand few search engines facts and figures.
As of 2020, 93% of web users make use of search engines every day
Google shares 76% on desktop and 84% on mobile search traffic.
This shows that how the search engines dominance increasing over any other internet activities
Google holds the highest rank with the 90.62%of internet traffic followed by Yahoo 3.78% and Bing 3.72%
Google claims in 2019 that 93% of all organic search engines visit in the US.
Bing holds 33% of internet searches in US,
whereas Yahoo search engines show over 600 million user on the mobile monthly.
Studies indicates that visitors pay more attention to the organic search results over the paid or sponsored results and most likely visitor clicks the organic search results than the paid results.
However paid results can achieve more traffic if they appear above the organic results.
User pay more attention to what is contained at the top of the page as compared to pay lesser attention to the bottom of the page.
Same thing happens to the keywords and descriptions that written in bold letters creates more attention as compared to simple text, and if it is found on the bottom of the page lesser chances of click.
The queries that users make on search engines basically can be divided into three categories:
• Action searches or ‘Do’ queries –
e.g. Convert Rupee to Dollar or download a file.
• Navigation searches or ‘Go’ queries –
e.g. Users looking for a particular website like a actors fan page or news website.
• Information searches or ‘Know’ queries – e.g. What year did the Olympics games start?
In addition to these queries, with the overwhelming induction of e-commerce, a further fourth category can be made which can be called:
• Commercial searches or ‘Buy and Sell’ queries –
e.g. Buy used iPhone 4 or sell a car.
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