What is SEO & How SEO Work

What is Search Engine Optimization SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing a website or webpage in order to increase the amount and quality of organic search engine results.

The benefits are obvious: free, passive traffic to your website, month to month.

But how do you improve your content for SEO, and what "ranking factors" actually matter?

To answer this, we must fir

st understand how search engines work.

Search engines are like libraries for the digital age.

Instead of storing copies of books, they store copies of web pages.

When you type a query into a search engine, it looks at all the pages in its index and tries to return the most relevant results.

To do this, it uses a computer program called an algorithm.

No one knows how these algorithms work, but at least we have hints from Google.

What they say on their "How Search Works" page:

To give you the most useful information, search algorithms look at many factors, including your query terms, page relevance and usage, resource expertise, and your location and settings. The weight applied to each element varies depending on the nature of your question - for example, content freshness plays a bigger role than dictionary definitions in answering questions about current news topics.

When it comes to Google, this is the search engine that most of us use. At least for web search. This is because it has the most reliable algorithm ever.

That said, there are many other search engines that you can improve.

Learn more about how search engines work in our guide.

How SEO works.

Simply put, SEO works by showing search engines the best results for the topic of your content.

This is because all search engines have the same goal: to show their users the best, most relevant results.

In particular, how you do this depends on the search engine you are optimizing for.

If you want more organic traffic to your web pages, you need to understand and adapt to Google's algorithm. If you want more video feedback, it's all about YouTube's algorithm.

Since each search engine ranking algorithm is different, it will be impossible to cover all of them in this guide.

So, going forward, we'll focus on how to rank in one of the largest search engines ever: Google.

Fun fact

Google has a market share of 92%. That's why it pays Google to improve your website instead of Bing, DuckDuckGo, or any other web search engine.

How to improve Google

Google famously uses over 200 ranking factors.

Even in 2010 it was rumored that there could be as many as 10,000.

No one knows what all of these ranking factors are, but we do know some of them.

How? Because Google told us, and many people - including us - have studied the relationship between the various factors and Google's rankings.

We will talk about some of them soon. But first, an important point:

Google ranks web pages, not websites.     

Just because your business makes stained glass windows doesn't mean that every page of your site should be categorized for queries, "stand glass windows".

You can categorize different pages with different keywords and titles.

Now let's talk about some of the things that affect ranking and search engine visibility.

Crawling ability

Before Google can consider ranking your content, it must first know that it exists.

Google uses a variety of methods to discover new content on the web, but the basic method is crawling. Simply put, crawling is where Google follows links to pages they already know they haven't seen before.

To do this they use a computer program called a spider. 

Suppose there is a backlink to a website on your homepage that is already in Google's index.

The next time they crawl this site, they will follow this link to discover the homepage of your website and possibly add it to their index.

From there, they will crawl the links on your homepage to find other pages on your site.

That said, there are some things that can stop a Google crawler:

Poor internal linking: Google relies on internal links to crawl all pages on your site. Pages often do not crawl without internal links.