What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a technical and strategic practice of increasing visitors to a website through improving the ranking of the site in search engines like Google (or Bing).

I’m elaborating the definition so that you can catch everything.

You know that Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. are search engines, but the most popular one is Google. Popularity of Google is to the extent that it has already become a buzz word, even in verb forms. You may say that you’re Googling for latest political news or you’ve Googled on how to stay fit. It means, you’re searching or you’ve searched something on Google to know through your smartphone or PC.

Billions of people do Google each day to know or learn something they need to or want to. People have been habituated of searching everything they need to know through search engines. For example – ‘how to dress well for an evening party’ or ‘where to buy a home at better price’. You’re familiar with all these stuff. These are all search queries. When you type a search query in the search box of Google or Bing, within less than a second, the search engine will deliver you many thousand or even million results. The results are collected from all available websites on the internet. There are thousands of websites to deliver the similar result. But the search engine (such as, Google), places the best relevant result at the top. Deciding their qualities and relevance, Google will place all other results in the subsequent positions.

Can you get your webpages at the top of Google search? Yes, you can. If your pages are optimized better than those of your competitors, there are chances that for relevant search queries those will appear at the top in Google search results.

Now, you can comprehend that SEO is the practice of helping search engines to rank your web-pages better than those of your competitors.

You may wonder that how a search engine can compare the qualities of different web pages and rank them in accordance.

How do Search Engines Work?

Search engines are complex algorithmic program based machine learners that completely depend on logic. A logical algorithm is everything that a search engine can comprehend. If you don’t violate any logic, a search engine will find your webpages on the internet. After finding your webpages, search engines will index them in their databases. At the next level, all the indexed webpages will be ranked in accordance to a number of complex parameters. For a certain search query, a search engine will find the best relevant results from the database and will display as search result in accordance to the ranking.

The search technology that is used by Google or any other search engine is based on three basic operations – crawling, indexing and ranking.

Crawling: Search engines have millions of search robots those crawl the internet to find out new webpages and changes in existing pages. On the internet, the search robots can discover anything that is published and have open access permission including webpages, documents, images, videos and links. The robots those crawl the internet are also known as crawlers and spider. The main Google crawler is Googlebot.

Indexing: All the content that is found during the continuous crawling processes are stored and organized in a gigantic database of the search engine. This process is known as indexing. Everything that is indexed by the search engine can be displayed for relevant search queries.

Ranking: When someone performs a search by typing to the search query box or speaking to the search engine, the search engine organize the available content in the index in order on the basis of relevance and quality scores and then displays as result. In order to assign a ranking score to certain content, search engines follows hundreds of criteria. Most prominent search engine ranking criteria are relevance, quality and reliability.

How Does SEO Work?

In order to achieve good faith from the users, search engines (including Google and Bing) strive to provide the best answer to each search query. To every query, Google displays the results in proper order after assigning scores to each individual result. Google score factors are largely based upon relevance and reliability.

Google have more than 200 criteria in ranking webpages for search results. More than half of the ranking criteria of Google are unknown. The known criteria emphasize on excellent user experience and the quality of both the content and the website. Good content on a good website get better chances of being ranked higher for relevant search queries.

SEO, therefore, involves making sure that you are striving your best to ensure excellent user experiences. Your website most be error free and technically sound. Content in your website should be well structured and adhere to all quality criteria laid by search engines. You must should take adequate strategic and creative measures to influence the search engine’s scoring factors.

Google has clear guidelines on quality criteria of web content. These guidelines provide details with examples of good and bad content. According to these guidelines, web contents with expertise, authority and trustworthiness (EAT) are rewarded with higher ranking for relevant search queries.

You may ask that how Google can determine the relevancy and quality of a certain web content. This is right thing to ask and let us answer.

Relevance: Relevance of a webpage is determined by the density of keywords in the content. A keyword is the search phrase that a user of search engine uses to make a query. If your content has good density of keywords, it can be ranked higher for the query. However, it’s not a thumb rule for all the cases. There are chances that you may use keywords unnecessarily in your content just to trick the search engines. Google has complex RankBrain algorithm that can find out how much the used keywords is relevant to the content. If the RankBrain finds that you are unnecessarily stuffing the keywords in the content, it can penalize you for the dishonest activity. Therefore, you must be careful in using keywords in your content.

Quality: Search engines determine the quality of a webpage by multiple scoring factors. The most prominent factor that determine quality of a webpage is ‘backlink’. If your page have plenty of backlinks from other authority websites, Google believe that your page is of high quality.

What are the Types of SEO?

SEO involves a number of activities that can be divided into two main categories – technical SEO and strategic SEO. Some experts also divide SEO into onpage SEO and offpage SEO. While onpage SEO involves both technical and strategic aspects, offpage SEO is related only to link building activities.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to all activities those make a website technically sound. The activities include:

• Proper distribution of JavaScript, HTML and CSS codes
• Elimination of all rendering path blockage
• Elimination of all unnecessary redirection
• Heading tag distribution
• Meta tag assignments
• Server error fixing
• 4xx error fixing
• 301 redirection for permanently moved pages
• Structured data enhancement
• Rich card enhancement
• Internal link enhancement
• Management of website enhancement features
• AMP page creation
• Mobile usability testing
• Speed optimization

Strategic SEO

Strategic SEO involves a number of onpage and offpage activities that help a website in gaining better rank by search engines. The most important strategic SEO activities include:

• Quality content development
• Press release submission
• Guest blogging
• User experience enhancement