What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a process which helps to improve the organic (non paid) search of a website and increase the traffic. It brings more and more visitors to a site if correctly followed the procedures and rules. It helps search engines to get the best available content based on the user’s search.
“The Ranking Factors actually matters in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)”.
Let's try to understand the SEO and SEO related elements. Why the ranking of websites is important? How Search engines work and how SEO helps the search engines to show the most valid content/information to the user.
Search Engines
Consider Search Engines like a library for Digital books. They know the information in all the books. Search engines are digital Librarians of digital books/websites. They keep on the information into their index for the quick search.
When we type something in the search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), it looks into the index and tries to find out the most relevant result. A huge calculation called ‘Algorithm’ involves performing this action. Algorithms are nothing but just computer programs.
According to Google, search algorithms look at lots of factors to give the best result. Some factors are as below:
1. Words of your query.
2. Relevance & Usability of pages.
3. Expertise of Source
4. Your Location
5. Settings
Search Algorithms calculates the weights based on the above and many other factors. The highest weighted information/web pages will be displayed on top. The top listed websites on search engines are considered as highly ranked websites. Every Search Engine has a crawler that searches and gathers all the information about the content they find on the internet and build an index for fast and better search.
How Does SEO Work
The goal of SEO and Search Engine is almost the same and that is to show the best and most relevant result to the end-user.
Every Search Engine has its own Search Algorithm, for video view we need to work and follow the rules of the YouTube algorithm and for the website, we need to follow Google Algorithm for the best organic search result.
One important thing to remember is that Google ranks web pages, not the website.
There are thousands of ranking factors but we will discuss a few of them.
a. Crawling Webpages Content
Although Google has many ways to discover new content, but the primary method is crawling. For this google use a computer program called the spider. Spider search links and adds them in their index if not already there. Google Crawler can be blocked in the following condition
1. Poor Internal linking
2. Nofollowed Internal links (nofollow tag)
3. NoIndexed pages (noindex meta tag)
4. Blocks in robots.txt (can be mentioned in robots.text file to crawl or not crawl the links/pages)
b. Mobile Friendly
Almost 65% of traffic comes from mobile devices and this number is also increasing day by day. For better ranking your website must be mobile-friendly, all the content must be optimized for the mobile users as well.
c. Page Speed
The loading speed of your website is very important. For the satisfaction of the user, Google wants the page to load as soon as possible. It considers the fast loading page for ranking first.
d. Internet Search for Keywords
You need to search for keywords on the internet that best suit your content. There are keyword planners website’s on the internet from where we can find SEO friendly keywords.