SEO is often thought of as techniques used to increase viewership on websites, but SEO started as a way to improve modern search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo. These search engines help people find what they’re looking for online, but in order to be effective, they need to be efficient at finding relevant websites and curating the results to their audience. In order to understand why SEO is important, you first need to learn how search engines work.
How Google Works
By far, Google is the most popular search engine with 80% of the market share and capturing just shy of 95% of all mobile traffic. Google works by following links and using automated “crawlers” to discover new sites to add to their index. First, their “crawlers” search the web for new or updated websites and then stores the URLs for later. They primarily find new websites by following a lot of links from pages they already know about. After crawling, Google visits all the new pages it finds and tries to analyze what each one is about and indexes that information in a massive database. Finally, using that database, Google chooses the best websites to show users when they make a search. This complicated process is what’s commonly known as Google’s algorithm.
How SEO Works
Now that we know how Google generally works, how does SEO come into play with different search engines? Basically, search engine optimization is how you enhance your website so it is more likely to show up when users make a search. It’s the practice of customizing your web content to be keyword-friendly, including lots of links, and making sure your website is active, so Google knows it’s relevant. These techniques can help show different search engines that your content is important and is the best answer to different search queries. The more relevant and popular your page is, the more likely Google will choose it to show to users and the more likely that consumers will click on it. Understanding how search engines work and looking through webpages can help you understand how SEO functions so you can optimize your content better.
One Response
I really liked the breakdown of how Google SEO works. I like that you talk about crawlers, and how they follow links from pages that they already know about as a way to find out about new and relevant content as I didn’t know that was one of the ways that crawlers worked.