What is SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO is very important for marketers. Optimizing your web pages, including your blog posts, can help your site appear to people who use search engines (such as Google) to search for your product or service.
The SEO strategies fall into 2 groups On Page and Off Page SEO
And as the benefit of doing the SEO you get traffic in return
Definitive results but it depends upon how you optimize your content for SEO? And which “ranking factors” really matter?
To understand that in better we need to know how the search engine works
How SEO works?
Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages with their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly called search engine bots or spiders. Search engines navigate the Internet by downloading web pages, following links on those pages, and discovering new pages as they become available.
Search Engine Index
Web pages found by search engines are added to a data structure called an index.
- Keywords found in page content – what topics does the page cover?
- Type of content crawled (using microdata called schema) – what does the page contain?
- Page Freshness – How often has it been updated?
- Historical User Engagement for Pages and Domains – How do people interact with pages?
What is the purpose of search engine algorithms?
The main goal of a search engine algorithm is to present a set of relevant high-quality search results that will answer a user’s query/question as quickly as possible.
The user then selects an option from the list of search results, and this action, along with the next, then drives future learning activities that can affect the engine’s rankings future search.
What takes place while a search is performed?
When a user enters a search query in a search engine, all the pages that are relevant to the search query is indexed and an algorithm is defined to set the order of the pages.
Search engines also uses other data to return the results,
- Location – Some search queries depend on location, for example, “nearby coffee shops” or “movie times”.
- Detected language – The search engine will return results in the user’s language, if it can be detected.
- Past Search History – Search engines will return different results for a query depending on what the user searched for before
- Device – Depending upon the device a different set of results for the search query
Why can't a page be indexed?
- txt file exclusion – a file that tells the search engines what should be accessed and what should not be accessed on your site.
- Site directives tell search engines not to index this page or to index another similar page.
- Search engine algorithms consider the page to be of low quality, have thin content, or contain duplicate content.