What is SEO and how exactly does SEO work?

Search engine optimization is something that most business owners are aware about. The fact is if you have a website it’s somehow essential to know about SEO basics.

In this post, we will walk you through what SEO is and how exactly it works. Let’s get started.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of improving your website’s quality to achieve better visibility on the search engines.

Is it so simple, just a process and that’s all.

Not exactly and not so simple. It’s a set of processes which when applied properly on a website, ensures better visibility on the search engines. And these processes are the key to drive more qualified visitors often referred to as organic traffic to your website.

All the processes work towards one goal. The goal is to rank the website results at the top most position on a search engine result page. Millions of visitors come to search engines to get the most appropriate answer to their questions. These questions are termed as search query and from SEO perspective these are treated as keywords. All the SEO processes evolve around these keywords for which the target is to rank the website on the top position.

There are 4 important pillars of SEO which are: on-page SEO, technical SEO, off-page SEO and content SEO.

On-page SEO also referred as onsite SEO is the process of optimizing the source website in accordance with search engine algorithm, which helps in improving the website’s position for certain keywords.

Technical SEO mostly done to improve the website’s crawlability and index ability making the websites easier for search engine crawlers to read and store in search engine’s index/database.

Off-page SEO also known as SEO backlink creation in which backlinks are created on authority websites in order to improve the website’s trust score and also enhances the authenticity of the website.

Content SEO is something in which various types of contents are created targeting the users intent and provide them with the most possible results. Content SEO can be applied both to on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

With good SEO practices, your website can drive more traffic/visitors from the organic search results on the major search engines. The most used search engines are Google, Bing, Yahoo; returns a list of results when a query/keyword is searched. The primary search results in these major search engines are web pages supported by other content types such as images, videos, local listings, news articles as such.

Do you know what the total number of websites in the world is? That’s more than 1.98 billion (198 crore) websites online as of Sep 2022.

That’s a fair bit of idea what SEO is and an overlook on some of the important SEO processes used by marketers to rank the website.

How Does Search Engine Optimization Works?

Before understanding how SEO works, let’s debate. Why search engines are becoming an integral part for most of the users. Or is it not important at all.

Let’s dig some stats here. 8.5 billion (850 crore) searches happened in a single day only on Google search engine. That’s some good god numbers, isn’t it. And the total population of the world is around 780 crores. That means on an average more than 1 search is done per 1 person.

That clearly states the importance of a search engine. Search engines have been the answering machine for almost everyone in the world.

Let’s come to the point, how SEO works actually. What we all know is, when we search something the search engines come up with some relevant answers. But what exactly is the mechanism on which the search engines are able to provide answers to so many people, so many queries.

3 important stages are what makes the search engine the supremo above all, and to answer all sorts of queries searched. It starts with Crawling, then Indexing and at last Ranking. Sounds a bit technical. Let’s decode these 3 things.

1. Crawling

Crawling stage, during which the search engines send a web crawler (a computer program) also known as search engine bots or search engine spiders to find new pages and collect information. It’s the crawler who discovers new pages on the internet. And the search engine crawlers follow links from pre-indexed or pre-crawled websites to new sites.

Here’s an example to understand the scenario better. You have launched a new website with some web pages. You have created some online profiles for your website and placed your website link there. The online profile you selected is already discovered by the search engines. So, what the search engines do is just follow the new link (your new website) and discover your website which was built recently. 

2. Indexing

Indexing is the process in which search engines decide whether or not to store the links discovered in the crawling stage. Search engines index web pages by taking many factors into consideration to identify the worthiness of the web pages.

An example could help understand the indexing concept better, right? So let’s take your website again into the scenario. Your website has completed pages as well as under-construction pages. The search engine crawlers might identify the completed pages more worthy than the under-construction pages. This is how the indexing process helps search engines identify the worthiness of web pages and index them accordingly.

Don’t miss the agenda, search engines take many factors into consideration to identify if the web page is suitable for indexing or not. The above is just an example to make you understand the process.

3. Ranking

Once the crawl and index is completed, the ranking stage comes into action. It is the stage where the complex mathematics is solved i.e., to identify which web pages are relevant to a particular search query and in which order the web pages are to be displayed to the users.

During the ranking stage, search engines take more than 200 ranking signals/factors into consideration to rank and sort the web pages. The 200 factors are mostly divided into 3 important pillars: technical optimization, on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

These three stages are important for SEO which we do with the utmost care to bring you the desired result and build your online brand visibility for a long-term investment.

Mark My Words believes in a holistic SEO approach and has a proven track record of increasing organic traffic up to 12x within a time span of 12 months.

Want to know more about SEO practices, or if you’re looking for agency support in the areas of SEO, get in touch with Mark My Words now!