What is SEO and How it works?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it is a way of attracting targeted traffic to a website from a search engine’s organic rankings. SEO is all about improving your online presence organically, which means free, of course. The goal of SEO is to make your website better for search engines.

It includes all the elements that can create high-quality content, optimise content around specific keywords, and build backlinks. SEO is the process of understanding what people are looking online, answers they are seeking, words they are typing and having information to these responses will enable you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you provide.

In layman’s terms, we can say, when you search on Google, it shows your searched results. You’ll notice that you’ve got some ads at the top and sometimes right at the bottom of the page, and this is what is known as PPC or Pay-Per-Click. The website listings in between the ads are the organic listings. With SEO, you can improve the position of your website in the organic listings.

You may also like, What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Why SEO is Important?

SEO is essential for your website for getting traffic and lead generations. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing decide which websites need to rank highly for every question you put into the search bar. When search engines rank a particular website high, the website gets greater visibility and more traffic, leading to conversions.

If you are producing high-quality content with relevant keywords that appeals to visitors, then you’ll have a better chance of showing up in Search Engine’s listings. Search engines are usually impartial and place your website where it deserves to be ranked. Search engines are getting smarter and encourage hard work and diligence, which is necessary for getting maximum visibility of your website.

Visitors trust search engines and getting a top spot in search engines show that your website has credibility and worth. If your website is ranking higher in results pages, it will open ways for getting more clicks and traffic.

SEO helps give a better user experience and convert site visitors into buyers. If you want to reduce the money spent on advertising your website on search engines, then SEO is a great way to achieve just that. It costs to set up your SEO campaign at the start, and then monthly maintenance and data analysing costs. However, over time, SEO attracts quality traffic to your website that paid search advertising cannot.

Secondly, over 25% of people click on the first organic result, and then this percentage decreases as you go down the web listings on page one to about 2.5% on the 10th listing.

A famous quote is very relevant here:

“which is the best place to hide a dead body. It’s on the second page of google search.”

It’s because people usually don’t bother to explore other pages.

So, how does Google know what to rank?

When you consider specific search terms that people type in that have millions of results. Let’s start with looking to see how SEO works from Google’s perspective.

How does SEO work in Google?

There are three key components of how search engines work.

Crawl

Crawling is the process of finding and discovering new webpages and URLs by following links by reading sitemaps. First of all, you start with a search spider that will crawl web pages all across the web and then it will be able to place them in an index based on the relevancy that it’s associated with what it has crawled.

Index

Then Google saves all website pages that it knows in its index. The index entry helps set forth the content and location (URL) of that page. After that, when it’s on the index, you’ll be allowed to send data to the algorithm; they can also fetch data when users are putting in questions. That’s how these search results are returned to them to best match what it is that they were searching for.

Robots.txt

There are ways for users to manipulate how and if crawlers can access individual pages on a website. You can do that through the robots.txt on your website, so you’re able to select the user agents and essentially the crawlers, and you can choose whether to give them permission to crawl individual web pages. You can also check your robots.txt for yourself to see if any errors are using the robots.txt tester.

Now that you know how Google crawls through the hundred thousands of websites on the Internet, let’s look at how you can improve your website visibility through on-page and off-page SEO. Or simply, you can ask your SEO professionals to work on your website ranking and leave the technical terms for them.

On-Page SEO	Off-Page SEO	Technical SEO
Title Tags	Link Building	Algorithm Updates
Meta Descriptions	Content Marketing
Headlines and Headers	Guest Blogging
Keywords
Content

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is a method of optimising web pages to boost website ranking in search engines and get organic traffic. It also makes it easier for search engines to interpret the webpage. Most importantly, it deals with your website’s content quality, page performance, usage of keywords, page title, and content structure. In short, it refers to all the aspects your site visitors can see on your web page.

Below are the five fundamentals of On-Page SEO:

Title Tags

As title tags are displayed prominently in search results, web browsers and social networks, they play a vital role in getting visitors to your website. Duplicate and poorly written titles may harm your overall SEO efforts. It would help if you optimised the rubric by making it catchy and attractive for users.

Title tag in search results

Title tag in web browsers

Title tag in social networks

Meta Descriptions

It describes what your particular article is all about. It tells the visitors about your content. It shows up in the SERPs below the title of the page. Optimising meta description can improve the click-through rate (CTR) and quality of the result.

Headlines and Header Tags

Your website content can perform well in SERPs if you write compelling and engaging headlines. It must spark interest to stand out on search engines. It should compel site visitors to go through all your content.

For example, a heading that reads: “How to improve your SEO efforts” does not answer the question of why should your site visitors read the page. However, an attention-grabbing headline like “Growing your online presence: Why is SEO so important during COVID-19?” clearly tells your readers that if they want to grow their one presence during COVID-19, they should invest in SEO.

When you’ve written your headlines, you need some subheadings to help your site visitors quickly and easily read your content. Header tags are used to differentiate between your main headline (H1) and subheadings (H2-H6). In HTML codes, header tags are written as <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>, and etc. When Google crawls through the Internet, it recognises the keywords used in the headers tags and matches the keywords with users’ searched term.

Keywords

Keywords are the fundamentals of successful SEO. Therefore, you need to conduct keyword research for every web page you create, especially your home page and product/services pages, so you know which keywords are most searched and relevant to your target audience. Using these keywords in the content of your website enables Google to better match your website to Internet users’ searched terms.

However, this does not mean you should repeat the same keyword in every sentence you write. Your content still needs to be natural to read for human eyes. Keyword stuffing, or using keywords too many times, does not improve your site’s ranking as Google will penalise pages that have keyword stuffing and your page will not show in a good position in the search results. Serious infringement with Google’s SEO guidelines can lead to your website being removed altogether.

Content

Often, people will write the content for their website, and forget about it. However, you should regularly audit your website content to make sure it stays relevant to your target audience. This means you should not only publish regular blogs and articles to keep your website looking fresh, but you should also work on existing content on your website.

By auditing your website, you will be able to evaluate whether your current content is achieving its targets or not. Also, it will allow you to identify whether the information your content carries up to the mark or outdated. You will also get to know what kind of content is helpful for your website.

Writing compelling and captivating content that resonates with your target audience helps reduce the bounce rate, i.e. site visitors will stay on the page to read your content.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO includes all the activities outside your website, such as backlinks from another site, content marketing, and guest blogging. So, it informs search engines what others think about your website. It also helps improve your website’s domain authority, trustworthiness and relevance.

Below are the three factors of off-page SEO:

Link Building

Link building is an essential part of off-page SEO. Building links from high authority websites provide credibility and value to your website. It is a vote of trust from one website to another one. You should earn links from quality websites, not from low-quality websites. Hence give priority to quality over quantity.

Content marketing

Content marketing also comes into the parameters of off-page SEO. It is a method of sharing and promoting your content through paid or unpaid social media channels such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

For instance, you can market your content on YouTube by writing an article and then sharing its link on the aforementioned platforms. Doing so will increase your content visibility and drive traffic to your blog.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a way of promoting and marketing one’s personal or corporate brand by writing and publishing a blog on a third-party website. It gives a notable boost to search engine optimisation and develops a relationship with your current and new customers. It’s a way of connecting people to your brand. It also helps to establish your business as well.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is about how search engine crawlers find and access your website. It deals with your website’s technical aspects, such as your website’s loading speed and how you can make it faster to load.

Technical SEO also deals with server optimisations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. Technical SEO also ensures your site is mobile-friendly.

Algorithm Updates

Google’s algorithm is a way used to retrieve data from its search index, and it delivers quick results of a query. SE uses various algorithms and ranking factors to deliver pages ranked by relevance on its SERPS.

In the past years, Google rarely used to make updates to its algorithms. But now it has been making numerous changes every year. These changes have a significant impact on SERPs.

Google is essentially trying to make sure that it’s future-proofing the results that it gives to users so that everyone searching has the best experience possible and gets what they’re looking for.

Conclusion

First things first, you need to audit your website and find out how it’s performing. You can develop an SEO strategy by creating a list of keywords, then having a detailed analysis of Google’s first page. Secondly, you need to make better and different content from what’s out there. Also, to improve search ranking, you should create more backlinks to support your website.

And finally, you should continuously improve and update your content to boost the conversion rate.

If you need more details or want any help let us know because, at KWD, we have helped companies around the world to grow their businesses. Let us help grow yours.