All about SEO Basics: Read or Miss out !
Gone are the days when people used to depend on yellow pages and real-time networking in search of information. Now you can explore everything using the internet. The world is at our fingertips thanks to the advent of search engines.
But how do these search engines solve our queries within a fraction of seconds ?
If you ask an SEO company about it, they might confuse you making it look like rocket science. But not here.
This article will be an overview covering everything you need to understand about SEO, not in a tech-savvy way though. By the time you read this article, you will have a strong understanding of SEO.
What are search engines ?
These are the programs which crawl the content available on the web and provide relevant information to the user’s query. Some of their functions are :
- controlling the quality of content.
- digging deep into the web
- providing the best content
- solving the queries of its users.
What is search engine optimization ?
Every webmaster needs to know the actual meaning and potential of search engine optimization. Let us see what does it mean.
It is the process of attracting traffic on search engines from organic search results. In simple words, optimizing your website to make it rank higher on search engines.
It means increasing the quality of your website making it fast and easy to approach.
Few specific alterations may be needed on your website or content to make it Search engine friendly. When a search engine finds your content accurate and relevant, you outrank your competitors.
SEO is a set of guidelines if followed, provide great benefits either directly or indirectly. Hence it is a potential tool to generate organic and natural traffic on your website.
Implementing search engine optimization can make your business successful online. But to leverage it, we have to understand the basic mechanism behind it.
How SEO provide content to the user ?
It is very important to understand how search engine judges the relevance of the content and how it works.
Search engine basically has two functions : crawling the web and preparing an index.
Let us understand both.
Crawling the web
Search engines have robotic agents (crawlers) which crawl all the content available on the web several times a day. so basically search engines are the crawling machines which find the relevant and popular content for the users.
Index : Search engines are getting smarter every day. Still, they are machines and cannot figure out the quality of content like a rational human being so the crawlers after crawling the content, rank it on the basis of :
(a) popularity
(b) usefulness
Then it prepares an index in the huge database system they have worldwide. So the results you see is based on the artificial intelligence of these expert systems.they are smart enough to provide accurate results to the users within a frame of microseconds.
Now we have understood the working of search engines, but the objective is to find out those parameters on the basis of which they decide the ranking.
How do the search engine rank web pages?
The main objective of search engines is to separate the wheat from the chaff. They just want the best for their users. But, after all, they are machines. so how can they judge the usefulness of information?
It is the matter of finding the right words or what we call keywords. They search for some specific words which the user type in the search bar.
But search engines are more than finding the right words. They do not do it manually. They have a system of a sophisticated algorithm. For ease, we can say they have hundreds of ranking factors or variables which decide the index. For example, more the content is referred or linked, more the weight it carries as per the search engines.
Limitations of search engines
Understanding limitations of search engines can help us to reduce unexpected risks.
For example, if your link structure is poor or in rich media (flash files, images etc), then search engines may not crawl your content. Sometimes it does not respond to uncommon terms e.g., 'machine to cook food' instead of a microwave.
Why is search engine optimization necessary ?
The bottom line is optimization of your website is necessary to achieve higher ranking on search engines. If not recognized by the search engine, people can lose great opportunities.
If your content is crawled properly and ranked at the top,it creates more traffic or more customers to satisfy your business objectives. Without SEO, your content is like invisible for search engines and hence your customers.
So, better be doing it than regretting later.
Now you know the basics of SEO that will come handy whenever you explore it further. This information will help you to leverage the benefits of SEO. Make your content or website aligned with SEO and see the incredible results.
s information will help you to leverage the benefits of SEO. Make your content or website aligned with SEO and see the incredible results.
