What is SEO and How does it Work?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to expand the amount and nature of its traffic from a web search tool's natural outcome. The advantages are self-evident: free, uninvolved traffic to your site, after a seemingly endless amount of time after a month.

Digital marketing consultants stay up-to-date on the most recent SEO best practices and patterns.

Components on which SEO algorithms depends –

Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance, and use of pages, mastery of sources, and your area and settings. The weight applied to each factor shifts relying upon the idea of your question – for example, the uniqueness of the substance assumes a greater part in inquiries about current news than it does about word reference definitions.

Talking about Google, this is the search engine most of us use—at least for web searches, because it has the most reliable algorithm by far.

SEO works by visualizing to search engines that your content is the best outcome for the present scenario. All search engines have the same goal: To show the best, most pertinent outcomes to their clients.

If you need more natural traffic to your pages, you need to comprehend and cater to Google's algorithm. If you want more video views, then it all relates to YouTube’s algorithm. Let us focus on how to rank high in the biggest search engine of them all: Google.

How to optimize for Google?

Google broadly utilizes an excess of 200 ranking factors. This includes that you can rank for different keywords and topics with different pages. Pointers that affect rankings and search engine visibility are -

1 - Crawlability: Google utilizes a few different ways to find new content on the web, but the primary method is crawling. To lay it out plainly, crawling is where Google follows links on the pages, they already know about to those they have not seen before.

Fact - Let’s consider that your homepage has a backlink from a website that is already in Google’s index. Next time they crawl that site, they will follow that link to discover your website’s homepage and likely add it to their index. From there, they will crawl the links on your homepage to find other related and similar pages on your site.

Certain things can block Google’s crawlers:

• Poor internal linking: Google relies totally on internal links to crawl all the pages that are present on your site. Pages without internal links will not get crawled.
• No followed internal links: Internal links with no follow tags will not have any crawls by Google.
• No indexed pages: You can remove pages from Google’s index using a no index Meta tag or HTTP header. If other pages on your site only have internal links from no indexed pages, there is a chance that Google will not find them.
• Blocks in robots.txt: Robots.txt is a text file that directs Google where it can or cannot go on your website.

2 - Mobile-friendliness: 63% of Google searches come from mobile devices, and that number is growing every year.

Most people will hit the back button when a desktop version of a site loads on the mobile version. That is vital because Google wants to keep its users satisfied. Pages that are not optimized for mobile lead to dissatisfaction. Even if you do rank and win the click, most people will not stick around to consume your content.

You can check if your web pages are mobile-friendly co-relate with Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool.

Fact: According to the researches in 2016, Google announced a ranking boost for mobile-friendly websites in its mobile search results option.

Google also shifted to mobile indexing in 2018, meaning that they now use the mobile version of your page for indexing and effective ranking.

3 - Page speed: Pagespeed depends on how fast your page loads. It is one of the ranking factors on both, desktop and mobile. Google wants to keep its users happy. If their users are clicking on search results that take too long to load, it ultimately leads to dissatisfaction.

4 - Search intent: Finding a keyword or keywords that you want to rank for is simple to perform. Just paste a topic into a keyword research tool, and then opt for relevant keyword ideas with the required search volume. This is search intent in action. To optimize this, identify the "3 C's of search intent: Content type, Content-Format, Content angle.

5 - Back links: Google’s ranking algorithm is based on something called PageRank. In simple terms, this interprets backlinks as votes. Pages with more votes tend to rank higher. Backlinks matter if you want to rank for anything worthy or has any importance. Links can be challenging, especially to certain types of content like product pages.

6 - Authority: Building backlinks to your content, you should give priority to the building of links from strong pages over weak ones. URL Rating (UR) also takes into account internal links that link from other pages on your site.

If you want to increase the “authority” of a particular page and build backlinks to it, consider adding some relevant internal links from other high-authority pages. For authoritative pages, go through the "Best By Links" report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

7 - Content quality: Google wants to rank the most reliable and useful results, for this, they look at content-related signals like expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The accessible range of your content is to the majority of searchers, the better. Freshness is another important factor for some searches.

Search engine algorithms change all the time and there is no guarantee that what’s important today will still be important next year. The important things stay consistent over time.

SEO requires some patience to see results, and in this, your digital marketing consultant must ensure you achieve the results you want to achieve!