How to use SEO Effectively?

by Web Stalk Team

Suppose you need to find an address for a restaurant. Maybe you're looking for the nearest gas station. Or you wonder which ocean is the largest.

What do you do then? Google it.

You probably use it almost daily, but do you know how search engines actually work? We'll discuss the basics of what search engines are, how they work, and why it's important for businesses.

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a website that creates an index of web pages on the Internet. Search engines collect information from the entire World Wide Web and rank these web pages based on their content.

Search engines provide answers to people's questions every day. The purpose of a search engine is to provide the most relevant websites in response to search queries. The most popular and widespread search engine is Google. Google has reported that 100 billion searches are made on its website every month.

How search engines work

Search engines are complex computer programs. To fully understand every aspect of a search engine, one would have to study a lot and gain a deep understanding of computer algorithms. To save you trouble and confusion, we will go through the basics of how search engines work.

Basically, search engines work by sending bots called "spiders" or "crawlers" to any website on the Internet. These spiders crawl through your site and capture certain information, such as URLs, headers, navigation, site structure, and more. This information is indexed and stored. So when someone performs a search, search engines return results based on this information.

These spiders also follow the links on your page, which causes them to crawl further and further on the Internet, pick up information and store it in the search engine's index. For this reason, internal links on your page are useful to keep your content indexed and updated by search engines.

Indexing by search engines

When spiders or search engine bots crawl your site, they look for information that helps them identify your page so they know where to look on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Among the things these crawlers look for are several things:

  • Keywords: What keywords are on the page? What is the page about?
  • Type of content: What kind of content is included (text, images, video, etc.)?
  • Timeliness: How fresh is the content? How recently was the page created or updated?
  • Engagement: How fresh is the content? How engaged are visitors with the site or domain? How trustworthy or popular is the site?
  • URL: How relevant is the URL to the content of the site?
  • Linking: How trustworthy or popular is the site? What inbound and outbound links are associated with the site?

Once the spiders or crawlers store this information in an index, it is available for a search when someone performs a search. The algorithm takes this information and ranks the search engine's result pages according to what seems most relevant to the search term.

Algorithm of the search engine

When you perform a search with a search engine, an algorithm determines which results are displayed in which order. Search engine algorithms are complex, and they are not the same for every search engine. The results that appear on a Google results page might not be the same or in the same order as the results of a Bing search.

Based on the indexed information, a search engine algorithm ranks the web pages hierarchically for each search. The order is based on what the search engine considers to be most relevant to the search terms and on the pages that are most likely to return the answer that the searcher was looking for.

Other factors that can influence search engine ranking are:
  • Location: Some searches are based on location (e.g. "gas station near me"), but often if the search engine can determine your location, it will return local results, even if the location or location indicators such as "near me" are not included in the search.
  • Language: Search engines try to deliver results in the same language as your query, provided the language is recognizable.
  • Device: Some websites may not be mobile friendly, so search engines may return different results depending on the device on which the search was performed.
  • Previous searches: If you use the same search engine

Search engines and SEO

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization, and this name essentially tells you what SEO experts do: they optimize your website so that it appears on the relevant SERPs and ideally ranks above your competitors.

Since most people use search engines to find new products, shops, restaurants and much more, SEO is important to direct visitors and customers to your website.

The explanation of SEO can be complicated; there are many factors that influence how search engines rate websites. SEO professionals study the algorithms of search engines and learn the best methods to place web pages on the first page or pages of results. Find an SEO company that is transparent in its practices to help build the SEO of your website.