SEO 101: The Essential Guide

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SEO means Search Engine Optimization and is the process used to optimize a website’s technical configuration, content relevance and link popularity so its pages can become easily findable, more relevant and popular towards user search queries, and as a consequence, search engines rank them better.

Now What’s a Search Engine Does….

So, the working of the search engine is broadly categorized into 4 main steps..

1. Crawling

Crawling is the process of reading website codes(content) or in other words Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find. It is the discovery process in which search engines send out a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. Content can vary , it could be a webpage, an image, a video, a PDF, but regardless of the format, content is discovered by links.

2. Indexing

Indexing is storing your website page’s copy in Search Engines database. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.

3. Retrieval

In the process of retrieval the results are being fetched from the database when user asks for it.

4. Ranking

It is the process of placing a webpage on a result page in response to a user query. There could be multiple results that google retrieves and rank for a search query. That means results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.

SEO improves the website ranking in the search engine results pages. It also improve the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. SEO is a subset of search engine marketing, which also includes search engine advertising. SEO is a type of marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search.

Types of SEO’s

SEO is broadly categorized in 2 types: ON-PAGE SEO & OFF-PAGE SEO

ON PAGE SEO

On-page SEO, is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized.

OFF PAGE SEO

“Off-page SEO” (also called “off-site SEO”) refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). Along with on-page SEO, these include several of the factors of basic SEO that help a site to rank.