Search Engines and how it works (SEO -Search Engine Optimization)

A search engine is something that we use almost everyday. From studies to work and even to find the nearest coffee shop every service is given to us by a search engine. So the search engine must be a very powerful tool right? “Yes!” So it must have functionalities so complex which cannot be understand by a normal human right? “No! its no much simpler than we expect”

Although search engines does a lot of work in simplifying our work the functionality and the basic concepts behind search engines are not that complex. Although the study with regard to these search engines comes with fancy name like Search Engine Optimization(SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) the fundamentals are not as complex as we think they are.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines have formulas or algorithms that help them order the results. Search engines frequently sweep the web for new content. Where our website or content appear in this search results depend on many factors such as,

1. Words we use in the website (Key words in code, Topics , Title)

2. Number of websites linked to our website

3. How popular the site is

4. What people say about the site (ratings etc.)

Simply what search engines value most is unique, valuable, engaging relevant content because there job is to find most useful stuff to the person who is browsing the web.

Importance of an SEO plan

It’s important to have an SEO plan for your website. Just follow this step-by-step process to create an SEO plan, and learn how to develop, prioritize and adjust the plan to best suit your goals.

1. Keyword research
2. Consider related topics
3. Where do you appear in search results for those keywords
4. If there are gaps where keywords aren’t bringing traffic to the site, you should plan ways to fix these gaps and improve SEO performance.

Start creating an SEO plan by considering how to perform better in organic search for your most popular product or service. Which keywords seem important but aren’t sending you much traffic? How could you fix that?

But we have to remember he SEO plan will and has to change over time because internet is not a static page, it will always have something new every second and keeps updating, requiring us to be updated in order to appear in search results too. Adjusting is key.

Get discovered with search

The work of SEO is never done because trends come and go, users can change their behavior and also search engines evolve by the time. Our job is to keep a track of these changes and make changes accordingly in order to keep the organic traffic.

The term “organic traffic” is used for referring to the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads.

there are few simple ways we can use to keep up to date with search engines

1. Learn how search engines work
2. Keep an eye on changes and monitor how it affects our website
3. Find inspiration from other famous websites and adopt
4. Talk to customers and get feedbacks

Again simply understanding what visitors want is the purpose to achive here since they will most likely use those keywords and phrases to search there relevant needs .

How to choose keywords

Choosing keywords is the foundation of search engine optimization. Because we have to know the words that people use more often for searching in order to use them in our titles or content topics.

Failing to identify the keywords of our website can lead to confusion in results which can lead to incidents like a person looking for something else using the keywords we used but end up finding something else completely irrelevant instead. There are mainly 3 things to consider when choosing key words,

1. Frequency — How often the keyword is searched
2. Competition — How many websites use the same keywords
3. Relevance — Keyword we use must match the the content in our site

Setting realistic SEO goals

According to the target we want to achieve in our business we need to set SEO goals. Setting SEO goals gives us a better understanding about how our site is or is not performing.

Being number 1 in search results in not actually our goal to have more sales or market our brand more. If our website appear as number one search results and the visitors did not get what they were looking for , they might rate our website or company negatively. Resulting in overall decrease in sales and reputation.

We can use analytic tools to better understand and overview user behavior.

Will discuss more about SEM search engine marketing and search consoles in a future writing.