What is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?
Traffic on a website could be increased in two ways: Inorganic and Organic.
Inorganic traffic means that you are using ad channels such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads to increase interest in your website and hence increase traffic artificially.
This way of increasing traffic may be beneficial when you want to generate excitement about some event, product, or service that you are offering through a website.
But going through an advertising route may be costly and would depress your net margins.
And if you are a small-business owner, you may not be able to afford to pay Google or Facebook which may charge you PPC or pay-per-click and pay-per-view.
Moreover, finding your ideal audience may not be easy. So, what is the solution?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an organic way of increasing traffic on your website.
In this approach, you use SEO techniques which would help you to increase traffic passively on your website naturally and without paying Google or Facebook for digital advertising.
Optimizing your website according to search engine rules would help your website to get ranked on the first page of the major search engines in the world.
By using this long-term solution efficiently, you would be able to generate a lot of interest in your website and make your website a virtual revenue-generating channel.
How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?
Search Engines such as Google, Bing are internet tools that search a user-entered keyword or query and give results in Search Engine Result Pages of SERPs.
Google is used by 86.7% of the world population for search-related purposes, while the market share of Bing is 6.43%. Whenever a user searches for something on these engines, the results are populated and ranked under rules and relevance of content.
Before the results are shown, and the websites containing relevant content is populated, two essential processes are happening behind the scenes.
Crawling:
Search Engines have programs called bots or crawlers. The function of these crawlers is to be on a constant lookout of relevant content for the users.
After finding the relevant content, these crawlers would bring the data of pertinent information to the search engine’s servers. For instance, let us say a user searches for US Elections 2020 on Google.
If your website has keywords such as Elections 2020 or some information about candidates, crawlers will take notice of your website and hence would then help in improving the ranking of that webpage and website.
Indexing:
After the crawlers crawl to your website continuously, search engines like Google would start storing your webpages in their databases.
So, now instead of going to the server of the website, Google could retrieve this information from its database.
This process of storage and instantaneous retrieval of information from Google’s database is called indexing. Google and other search engines use this process of indexing to organize all the information on the internet.
You can check if any of your pages are indexed on Google or not by using the following command of Google Search Engine: site: www.website.com.
Ranking: After the pages are indexed, Google would assign a score to each of the indexed pages of your website. With the level of information that is present on the internet, it would be almost impossible for a user to know which information is relevant or useful.
That is where the Google ranking system comes into play. This system is designed to sort through billions of sources on the internet and present the content with relevant information in a fraction of a second.
Ranking of a webpage would depend on what that search engine uses ranking factors.
200 Key Factors in Ranking:
The ranking system uses multiple algorithms to present relevant information to a user. Search Engines such as Google take about 200 different factors into account to rank a page. Some of the most critical factors are:
The intent of the search:
Search Engines try to find the intent of a user search. These search engines strive to understand the natural language as much as possible, and understanding the meaning behind a search is extremely critical for these tools.
So, how does a search engine identify the intent of a user query? Each of the search engines performs extensive research on natural language.
This helps to understand if a user has entered a spelling mistake or matching the information using synonyms of a query.
Search Engines may also categorize information based on the broadness or specificity of a query. Such considerations would further organize the information on the freshness of data.
For instance, searching for the US Open 2020 score on Google would give the information on the matches that are being played currently and the scores of such games.
These circumstances are taken into consideration by search engines such as Google to understand the intent of a search.
Relevant Information:
Post understanding the intent of the user’s search, the next step is to find the relevant information for that search.
This could be as simple as finding webpages with the same keywords searched by a user or as complex as using aggregated and interaction data to ascertain that search results are relevant to a user.
For example, if a user wants a cat and dog, the relevant webpages would not be only those webpages that use these exact keywords but also other signals that may be of importance to a user.
This may include information on the breed of cats and dogs, type of food these animals eat or showing friendly videos of cats and dogs on the search results.
Content Quality:
Apart from matching phrases or keywords of a user search, search engines such as Google have built algorithms that investigate the quality of the content of a website or webpage.
This would depend on whether these webpages show expertise, domain authority, and credibility or trustworthiness on the searched topic.
For instance, if multiple users are visiting your website for finding the same information, your website’s authority and trustworthiness would considerably improve and help in making your rankings better.
Ease of Use:
Search engines, especially Google, look for webpages that are easy to use or usable. Having webpages with strong usability would help be preferred by the search engines over the not-usable ones.
Usability would look into multiple factors of your website such as whether your website is compatible to different browsers or not, how accessible is your website to people who are visually-handicapped, older or color blind people, what is the loading time of your website, how does your website perform on different devices such as Laptops, Desktops, tablets or smartphones and on latest versions of other operating systems such as Android, iOS, Windows.
Importance of Context:
Context has become an essential factor in the search engine world. The context could be based on a user’s location, search history, etc.
For instance, if you search for Olympics today, you may find information about when and where the next Olympics would take place, how did the USA perform in the previous Olympics or some history of the Olympics.
But if a user searches for Olympics in Tokyo, Japan in 2021, a search engine like Google would give information about what games would happen on that day, how could you reach to the Olympic stadium, the timing of different games, etc.
Hence, the context has become an essential factor in deciding the relevance and ranking of webpages.
Conclusion:
To summarize, optimizing your website or webpages by taking into consideration other factors would help to increase the organic traffic on your website.
A progressive increment of the traffic would help in a higher ranking of your webpages by taking your webpage on the first page of Search Engines.