Think about how often you use Google, Safari or other search engines to find products, people, clothes, news or just about any information.

As we delve deeper, the main question that arises is ‘How do search engines work to categorize websites and serve them back in results to searchers?’ For the majority of searches, this is achieved by applying SEO techniques to attain visibility in search results and increase search traffic to websites.

Optimization for SEO:

In digital marketing, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company to be found by searchers or your target customer base is a core skill, and understanding how SEO is evolving and all the working behind its basic concepts will keep you at the top of the game.

What’s noteworthy is that while SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles remain the same. Since Google arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, we can break SEO checklist into three major components:

1. Technical Optimization
2. On-Page Optimization
3. Off-Page Optimization
4. Content Management System (CMS)

A. Technical Optimization is the process of completing activities on your site that are designed to improve SEO but are not related to the core website content. It mostly takes place behind the scenes.

B. On-Page Optimization is the procedure of ensuring that the content on your site is relevant, factful and provides a great user experience. It involves targeting the right keywords from within your content and is accomplished through a content management system.

C. Off-Page Optimization is the activity of enhancing your website’s search engine rankings through activities outside of the site. This is almost always exclusively driven by backlinks, which help to build the site’s relevance and reputation.

D. A Content Management System, or CMS, is a piece of software that manages a website. It is where the content of a website, such as text, images, and videos, can be uploaded or modified. A CMS is also used to create optimized page titles and descriptions for SEO purposes. It usually has a user-friendly interface and, in some cases, drag and drop functionality for text boxes and images so that one can easily design page layouts. Some examples of content management systems include WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, and Expression Engine.

Search engine algorithms are computer programs that look for hints to provide the searcher with the exact results they are looking for. Search engines heavily rely on algorithms to find web pages and then decide which ones to rank and how to rank them for any given keyword. There are three steps to how search engines work:

A. Crawling

The first step in this journey is crawling. Search engines dispatch web crawlers to find new pages and record all the information about them. Web crawlers are also called ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’.

Their purpose is to discover new web pages, and also to recurrently check the content on the pages that have previously been visited to see whether they’ve been modified or updated. Search engines crawl web pages by following the links that have already been discovered.

For example, if there is a blog post and it’s linked to a website’s homepage, when a search engine crawls the respective homepage, it will then also look for another link to follow and may follow the link to the blog post, thus making the post searchable. Websites also have the authority to instruct search engines not to crawl certain web pages or elements so that they are left out of the index.

B. Indexing

The second step of the process is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine concludes whether or not the crawled content is going to be used. If the crawled web page is deemed relevant and worthy by the search engine, it will be added to its index. This respective index is used at the final ranking stage.

When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database from where it can later be retrieved. Above all, web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. Some of the reasons for a web page to not be placed in the index might be:

1. The web page is not mobile-friendly.
2. The content it contains is considered duplicate.
3. The content is considered low value or spam-worthy.
4. It could not be crawled.
5. The page or domain in question lacked inbound links.

C. Ranking:

The last step is the most important step, termed ranking. For a given keyword, search engines sort or rank the results to give the searcher the most useful and relevant results that can be found amongst the millions of possible results.

Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps have been completed. Hence, once a search engine has crawled and indexed a website, the site can be ranked.

There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all perfectly fit under the three pillars of SEO that we initially discussed: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. A few examples of the signals that search engines use to rank web pages are:

1. Keyword Presence in the ‘Title Tag’: Whether the keyword or a synonym relating to it was mentioned on the page and within the title tag.
2. Loading Speed of the web page:  How quickly the web page loads and whether it is mobile-friendly.
3. Website Reputation: Whether the web page or website is considered reputable and relevant for the topic being searched for.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to help a web page grow and fulfil its business goals. It helps in building a better relationship with the end-users. Increasing the visibility and ranking helps the pages gain user trust and pushes more people to the site.

It propagates conversion rates which ensure increased sales and growth of the respective businesses. Hence, SEO is an inseparable and integral part of digital marketing and used properly can effectively provide immense growth for businesses.