After creating a website, we publish it on the web to make it accessible to all. In today's digital era, hundreds of thousands of similar websites and resources are already uploaded to the internet. Millions of searches are performed on search engines like Google, Bing, and others daily. From finding a local shop to searching for complex and technical information, we always go to search engines. Therefore, optimizing your website to make it appear whenever someone searches for something related to it, we need to perform optimizations. The process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
In this article, we will learn some SEO basics and essentials and understand how search engines work to rank websites on the web.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process of getting your website to rank higher on the search engines. We optimize the website and its content so the search engines can understand what a website is about and make it relevant enough to the user queries. When a user searches for something related to your website, it appears on the screen if you have optimized it.
Why is SEO Crucial for Your Website?
SEO helps your website grow really fast. It serves the following benefits:
- Increased Online Visibility: SEO makes your website visible to potential customers and audiences.
- Enhanced Organic Traffic: You get more organic traffic when your website is well-optimized since the users can find it more easily by typing keywords in the search engines.
- Improved Credibility and Trust: When your website appears on user queries, its credibility improves. Since users trust search engines, when your website ranks higher on them, it is perceived to be more credible, trustworthy, and authoritative.
- Reliable and Long-Term Growth: A well-strategized SEO can give you more reliable and long-term growth than paid ads, which stop working once you are out of budget.
Let's learn a bit about how search engines work and some core SEO concepts.
How Search Engines Work? An Overview
To optimize your website effectively, it is crucial to understand the flow in which search engines work. The following are the three core actions a search engine performs:
Crawling: Discovering the Webpages
The World Wide Web is like a huge spider web where resources like websites, images, videos, etc, are stuck like insects stuck in a spider's web. To find these resources, the crawlers, aka bots and spiders, go to all the links from page to page, starting from the location they already know. They also use sitemaps that contain a list of all the pages on your website you want the bots to explore.
Indexing: Organizing and Storing Information
After discovering the new resources, the search engines store them in a huge database called index. It is just like an index in a book that tells the address of each chapter in a book. While indexing, the search engines check the relevance and context of the resources. It won't be indexed if your website is inaccessible to crawlers due to complex JavaScript or unreadable formats.
Ranking: Deciding What to Show for a Query
When a user searches a query in the search engine, its highly sophisticated algorithm looks for the most relevant resources in its index. Then, according to relevance and other key factors, the resources are displayed on the screen sequentially, starting from the most relevant to the least relevant.
The factors that the search engine considers for ranking include:
- Relevancy: How relevant the content of a webpage is to the user's query.
- Authority: How trustworthy is the website. This is determined by the quality and quantity of the links pointing to the website.
- User Experience (UX): How easy is the website for users to navigate? It includes the website's loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and look and feel.
Pillars of SEO: Foundational Concepts
To optimize your website effectively, you must be aware of the 4 fundamental pillars of SEO:
- Keywords: The Language of Search
Keywords are the words or phrases that users type into the search bar of a search engine when looking for information, service, or product. Knowing what your audience searches for is highly crucial to ranking your website higher on the search engines. Using these keywords, you can make search engines discover your website and appear when the user searches for something relevant. There are 2 types of keywords:- Short-tail Keywords: Keywords that are broad, have high competition, and have general intent are short-tail. For instance, blankets, clothes, shoes, etc.
- Long-tail Keywords: Specialized keywords that have low competition and high user intent. For example, How to style clothes while going to a wedding.
- On-Page SEO: Optimizing Content and Website Structure
On-page SEO refers to performing optimization activities within the website. It includes compressing the images and videos to load them quickly, incorporating keywords and relevancy in the text content, using meta descriptions, title tags, and proper headings (h1, h2, ..., h6), and making your URL structure clear. - Off-Page SEO: Building Authority Beyond Website
Off-page SEO refers to performing optimization activities outside of the website. It includes link building, i.e., getting links from other credible websites to your website and adding social media signals and SEO citations. - Technical SEO: The Foundation of Discoverability
Technical SEO is used to ensure that your website is discoverable by crawlers so they can crawl and index your website on search engines. It includes optimizing site speed (Core Web Vitals), making it responsive and mobile-friendly, using SSL certificate (HTTPS) and XML sitemaps. Also, using a robot.txt file to let the crawlers know of the pages you want to rank is also a good practice.
SEO is all about making your website the best answer to all your audience's queries by optimizing the content, building authority, and making your website technically sound. When users can view your web content, your website's authority and credibility improves, ultimately leading to higher rankings on search engines. Now that you are aware of the core concepts of SEO, we'll put it all into practice in the next article.
