We often get asked the question about how SEO actually works. We believe in explaining things in a jargon-free way as possible so here is an explanation of how SEO works with websites.
SEO stands for `Search Engine Optimisation’ which enables websites to get featured and listed in major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. The list of results that come up when you type in a keyword term is called the SERPs (search engine results pages), and on these SERPs you get a list of website links that have been ranked according to importance.
A website that is optimised is more likely to appear on the first few pages for Google and other search engines, and hopefully on the first page. A website that appears higher up the list will of course by more noticeable to users and therefore the website link is more likely to be clicked.
Search engines will always crawl the internet for information, index web pages, match websites with search queries and rank websites in order of priority.
Using automated systems, search engines will crawl through millions of website pages. The next phase is to index these web pages in a huge server warehouse of information using indexing automation as to the type of information that are on these pages. When a search is implemented, the search engines will check these indexes and present the website pages that it thinks best matches a particular search query.
The art of SEO also helps to rank websites in order of relevancy and importance, so basically it sorts out the wheat from the chaff. Google gives web domain and authority scores to certain websites, and those websites with higher domain authority will ultimately rank higher than those that have a low domain authority. Google has a plethora of complex algorithms and criteria to determine what constitutes a high authority website – including quality content that is useful to your website visitors, a good user experience and a well constructed website with clear navigation that makes sense to the user.
In addition external websites that link to pages of your website can also add to your domain authority, especially if they have a high domain authority themselves.
So all of these factors will help you to rank higher in the search engines combined with the use of well optimised page title tags that show up as the blue links in Google and strong meta descriptions which is the description below the blue link.
SEO isn’t a magic formula, however, there are basics and fundamentals that should be implemented on every website as a matter of course to ensure that it has the best chance of being ranked by the search engines and found by potential customers.
Contact us to find out more about how we can help your business with SEO.