When you search in Google for any keywords, Google shows you list of websites related to your search results and getting website listed in organic search result is known as SEO, but do you know how SEO works?
Do you want to know How SEO works?
If you search in Google for this, how SEO works, no article or video will be able to provide you proper information about how SEO works.
I have got this questions from many people about what is SEO and how SEO works? How to we know how Google is able to find right website for right keywords?
In this article I will explain everything about SEO and how SEO works in 2021.
SEO keeps changing and how SEO works in 2021 is different from how SEO used to work in 2020 and 2019
Let’s learn about How SEO exactly works
As we all know, SEO is all about getting our website in Google search results for relevant keywords, but how does SEO work and how search engines can find relevant websites and show in search results for specific keywords?
Let me first give you an example:
If you search for electric cars in India
Google will show you 10 results related to your search query.
But the main question is, how does google know which websites to display in search results?
How
Yes, it’s power of SEO.
Let’s first understand what is SEO?
SEO is an acronym used for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is a digital marketing strategy used to show a website in the search engine to get free traffic without spending money on PPC ads.
SEO can be defined in many ways.
Standard Definition of SEO
SEO is the term used for “the process of optimising a website as per best practices suggested by search engines like Google to increase website visibility for specific topics or keywords”
The role of SEO is to increase the visibility of a website in Google or other search engines for relevant keywords to drive maximum visitors on the website.
In other words, SEO is all about making changes in our website and blog to show our website in search engine results so that we can get free traffic from search engines.
To understand how SEO works, it’s important to understand how Google search engine works?
If you try to decode the meaning of SEO – Search Engine Optimization, you will get a bit confused.
From the name, it looks like Optimizing search engine to show our website in search engine.
Actually, we don’t do anything in the search engine, we optimize our website so search engines can show our website in search results.
By the way, SEO is not limited to Google. SEO is a general term which can be applied for all other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex.ru etc.
How do search Engines work?
Internet is huge and there are millions of websites, billions of pages on the Internet. Finding the most relevant information from websites around the world is today possible because of search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu and Yandex.ru
Here is a quick summary of how search engines work and then we will understand the entire process in detail.
Search engines like Google first browse websites on the internet, collect all information on all pages of websites and add them to a database called index. When we enter the search query in Google, Google retrieves relevant pages from the index and displays on the search results page.
When we search in Google, we are actually searching Google index and Google shows us results from the index. This means, results we get are not real-time.
Now let’s understand how this process in detail:
Search engines have three primary functions:
- Crawl: Visit all websites on the internet and collect data from those websites.
- Index: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Indexing is another most important process of organising data.
- Rank: Ranking websites based on ranking factors and showing in results when a search query is entered in search engines.
Have you ever thought how do websites appear in Google search results when we search for any keywords or questions on Google?
How does Google find websites and show us results?
How to get website in Google to improve visibility?
What is SEO? A question that many people ask
Let’s understand what does SEO really mean
SEO is an acronym for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION –
SEO is the term used for the process of optimizing a website for search engines so that it can be found in search results. By following best practices suggested by Google and other SEO experts, we can improve our website ranking in Google search engine.
The role of SEO is to increase the visibility of a website in Google or other search engines for relevant keywords to drive maximum visitors on the website or on a blog.
By the way, SEO is not limited to Google. SEO is a general term which can be applied for all other search engines like Yahoo and Bing. (Both are same actually)
But we generally optimize our website for Google. Because Google is the most used search engine in the world. Google processes 63,000 search queries every second
If you can get your website on that first page of Google, you can get relevant traffic on your website.
How do we learn SEO?
SEO is a super complex and very difficult procedure to learn and implement. If done right, SEO can bring unlimited traffic and help in gaining popularity.
Before you start with the SEO process or try to improve the SEO of your website, it’s important to understand how does Google search engine work
Since this guide is for beginners, I have not included how actually Google algorithm works
Role of Google in the Internet
Internet is huge and there are millions of websites, billions of pages on the Internet. Finding the most relevant information from websites around the world is today possible because of Google Search.
Google search is the product of Google, which is used by people to search and find information on the Internet.
People search for news, price, information on the Internet. Google finds best matching websites and web pages from the Internet and shows on the search result page.
This procedure looks very easy and it happens in a few seconds. But it’s not.
For Google to show results, Google needs to crawl and index every website and every page on that website to make it available in the result. After indexing of pages, Google needs to decide ranking of pages by understanding the importance of that page, content on that page and how well content is matching with the search query.
To determine the ranking of a web page, Google uses a complex software algorithm to calculate relevancy and importance of pages indexed. This complex algorithm takes a decision of which page will appear at which position.
To decide importance, relevancy and usefulness of page, Google uses more than 200 factors to analyse content, quality and importance. These ranking factors have an impact on our website visibility.
In simple terms, to appear on Google search results, we must know those factors and follow best practices to improve our results.