SEO ( Search Engine Optimization )

When any information is searched for online by an individual ( user ), a query is entered in a search engine like Google and a list of websites (search results) containing that query term is generated. Users are more inclined to click or visit websites that are ranked on top of the list. Websites appearing first on the list are encompass to have more relevance to the query term & hence may provide information sought by the users. SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) is basically a process in which we can upgrade our website's quality and generate leads through search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the core part of Digital Marketing. SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) targets traffic to your website in an organic way.

In this blog of Search Engine Optimization we are going to learn :

• How do Search Engines work?
• Keywords
• Meta Tags
• URL structure
• Image Optimization

Let's start

1) How do Search Engines Optimization work?

Search engines are completely text driven. Despite the technology advancing very quickly, we may feel that search engines are quite intelligent being that can be impressed with cool style or relish the sounds and motion in videos.

On the contrary, Search Engines crawl across the Internet, Search Engines crawl a website and search for a particular section on the website (mainly text), which contains information on what a site is regarding, what information it carries concern to a users query etc. However, this transient rationalization is not too perfect and thus, search engines perform many activities so as to deliver the search results viz., crawling a website, indexing the site, processing the information, conveying the connection and computing the information.

Search engines recruit crawlers through the website to visualize the websites content. A crawler is a bit of computer code, known as a crawler or a spider (for e.g., Google Bot, a crawler of Google). Spiders follow links from one page to a different page and index everything they notice while moving.

Keeping in mind the count of pages on the net (over twenty billion), it is not possible for a spider to go to a website daily, simply to visualize if a brand new page has appeared or if an existing page has been updated with new information, generally crawlers might not be visiting your web site for days jointly or months.

To understand a crawler, you need to envision what a crawler sees on your website. Crawlers unlike humans do not see pictures, flash videos, JavaScript,frames, password protected pages and directories; hence, possessing a website with such characteristic would highly increase the chances of a spider to miss a important section of your website that had to be searched for.

To provide data in text form along with addition of pictures, videos etc. are a better option. Data that is not visible to a crawler will not be spidered nor be indexed and will also not be processed, to put in simple words, such information shall be non-existent for search engines.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a huge database, from where it can be retrieved later. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

For a human it will not be possible to process such large amounts of data, but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. Sometimes they might not get the meaning of a page right but if you help them by optimizing the page, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and thus for you,to get higher rankings.

Once a page is crawled, the content needs to be indexed. The indexed page is kept in a database, which is retrievable as per requirement. Primarily, the method of segregation is characteristic to the words and expressions that best describe the page and assignment of the page to explicit keywords.

It may not be possible for humans to process such an amount of knowledge; however, search engines can attain this task very well. Generally, search engines may not get a page right; however, if you can facilitate the search engine by optimizing your web pages, it will be easier for them to classify your pages properly and for you, to achieve higher rankings.

When a search/research request comes, the search engine processes it and compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links, or metatags. That is why different search engines give different search results (pages) for the same search string.

What is more, it is a important fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want your website to appear first on the search results, you also need to adjust your pages to the latest changes. This is one reason (the other is your competitors) to devote permanent efforts to SEO, if you'd like to be at the top.

The last step in a search engine's activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.

In the next part we will discuss keywords.

---