In practice, SEO typically involves:
- Keyword research
- Content creation and optimization
- Technical optimization
- Link building
Every day, Google users conduct billions of searches for information and products. It’s no surprise that search engines are usually one of the biggest traffic sources to websites.
To harness this traffic source’s potential, you need to appear in the top search results for your target keywords.
The correlation is very simple—the higher you rank, the more people will visit your page.
How Do Search Engines optimization Work?
The ultimate goal of any search engine is to make searchers happy with the results they find.
To achieve this, search engines need to find the best pages. And serve them as the top search results.
Note: Google is not the only search engine. But it is by far the most popular one. That’s why we refer to Google most times we talk about search engines. Besides, SEO fundamentals are fairly similar across most search engines.
Google uses the following stages to find and rank content:
- Crawling: Google uses “bots,” or computer programs, to crawl the web and look for new or updated pages. In order for Google to find a page, the page should have at least one link pointing to it.
- Indexing: Next, Google analyzes each page and tries to make sense of what the page is about. Then, it may store this information in the Google Index—a huge database of webpages.
- Serving results: When a user enters a query, Google determines which pages are the best, in terms of both quality and relevance and ranks them in the SERP.