Trying to understand what SEO is
You have spent a good deal of hard earned cash, worked hard for many days and nights and built a great website, but alas! It doesn't get enough visitors as it does not have a high search engine positioning. There are millions upon millions of pages of web content out there and your website is totally lost in the shuffle, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. When search engines ignore your site, your site becomes non-existent in the cyber world.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your site appear at the top of search engine results for your domain-specific keywords and phrases. The higher your website ranks in the results of Google, Yahoo, MSN etc., the greater the chance your site will be visited, which in turn would give you greater visibility, skyrocket your sales or help you achieve your website's goals.
In a nutshell pages appear in a Google search result because their content matches the search criteria and they have links to them from other pages indicating their importance. So in simple terms, SEO involves writing pages that use keywords, words people use in searches, and securing links from other pages to show how important your page is compared to others.
Here are some definitions that will be helpful to you in your understanding of how Search Engines work:- Crawling - Crawling is the process by which Googlebots discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
- Indexing - Googlebots processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.
- Serving results - When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.
