An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization(S.E.O.), is a process undertaken by SEO experts to make your website appear at the top of search engine result page (SERP) when users are searching for information related to your business.

A study by Backlinko, a premiere SEO training company, indicated that the 1st result on Google gets 31.7% clicks out of the total clicks. The 1st spot gets 10x more traffic as compared to the 10th spot on the 1st page. So, If your website ranks on the 1st page and among the top 3 results for relevant search queries, a majority of the users will click on it and visit the site(Organic Traffic).

In this post we will explain the various terms associated with Search engine Optimization. Although this is not the entire list but it covers most of the topics for the S.E.O. beginners.

1. Website Audit

A website audit are a series of steps taken to check whether a website follows the prescribed guidelines laid down by a search engines like Yahoo, Google, Bing and others. The result indicates the search engine friendliness of a website. There are various tools available in the market that assist you in performing a website audit. In case you have built site using WordPress Content Management System (CMS) you may manually begin auditing the site and bring about the basic changes like title tags, meta description, alt text (images).

2. Keyword Research

Keywords are phrases or words used to search for information. Keywords are basically the combination of words that defines the services, products, or the information available on the website. As an SEO expert, while conducting the website audit one will also check the density of targeted keywords across web pages. Keywords research also helps in creating future content for the blogs article.

A brand generally prepares the keyword list as phrases its future customer might be using to search about the product / solutions / services offer by the brand. However, more professional approach is to take help of keyword research tools to exactly know the trending keyword associated with the business or keywords that has higher search volume. One of the most widely used Free Keyword Research Tool is "Google Keyword Planner"

3. Web crawler

A "crawler does website Crawling." A crawler is a piece of code that reviews all the web pages on the internet. It aims to identify the new web pages added to the internet and any content changes to the existing web pages.

4. Website Indexing

Once the webpages are crawled, all the content is indexed, i.e., arranged and organized. If indexed efficiently, it can help the search engine provide results to search queries quickly.

The longer it takes to display the results, the higher is the chance of the user exiting the current search engine and moving to another one to find the required information. As a website administrator, you can use Google Search Console for crawling and indexing your website on Google.

5. Ranking

It is a process of displaying search results to the users in a specific order. The search results' relevancy to a user's search query is essential. The aim is to help users find the necessary information in the shortest possible time. The most relevant results are shown higher, and as users go down the results page, the relevancy decreases.

For a search engine, ads are a significant revenue source. If we quit the search engine, it will be unable to show us any ads and that will impact its bottom line. Hence, they focus on delivering the best results to the users as quickly as possible so that they use the search engine more and click on more ads while browsing through it. If we do not find the information we are looking for, we will go to other websites to search for it.

As per Google, more than 200 parameters are used as signals to rank the search results.