What is Search Engine optimization?

Need for SEO

To stay ahead in the relevancy race for search results when search engines calculate the relevancy, websites (and webmasters) need to make sure they regularly perform optimization of their content.
However, before this optimization need, the webmasters simply had to submit the page URL to different search engines, who would then crawl that page and identify links to other pages from it, and return the content (words, weightage of specific keywords and location of words on the page) on that page for indexing. The links identified are stored in a scheduler so that they can be crawled later.
To make sure that the content and its meaning is understood accurately during indexing, websites started feeling the need to carry out optimization. This was required because the crawler may not land your site on a daily basis and hence may not come to know about any new pages added for a long period of time. And to be visible in the search results, the content needs to get crawled and indexed.

Websites realized the importance of doing SEO to ensure higher rank and better visibility in the search engine results.
It is better for a website if it appears at the top of a list of relevant search results (especially in the top two search results pages) as most end users tend to check out the websites appearing at the top. There are very little chances of someone going beyond the first couple of pages of search results to get information.
Thus, the higher the rank of a website, the earlier it will appear in search results. And the more frequently this happen for your website, the chances of getting good traffic will increase significantly.

Meaning of SEO

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. The use of this term started from around 1997 and slowly it caught the attention of webmasters all over the world.
It can be defined as a process that impacts a website’s visibility (or webpage’s visibility) in the search results (natural or organic) of a search engine.
SEO forms an integral part of internet marketing strategy.
People who provide SEO services are also sometimes referred to as SEO. In such cases, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimizers”.

SEO Requisites

To implement SEO, it is very important that webmasters have good knowledge of the following:

• Working of search engines (as mentioned in previous article) and the associated importance of crawling, indexing as well as relevancy calculation.
• The most trending search topics or search keywords used by people.
• Actual search strings that will be queried in the search engines i.e. ability to think from the point of view of end users who would search for information related to your website content.
• Popular search engines (like Google) often used by people globally.

Importance of SEO techniques

One of the prime concerns for any website owner is to ensure appropriate indexing of all pages of its website. For this purpose, they often resort to SEO involving optimizing their content, meta tags, coding, HTML source, etc. This helps to ensure majority of the pages are crawled and indexed. Another method of optimization is to promote your website and its content as much as possible (via social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc.). This will increase your chances of building genuine links to your site pages and as seen during the discussion on indexing concept, such links play a big role in ensuring your web pages get indexed appropriately.
Also, the various optimization techniques helps to increase the relevance to particular keywords used in the site’s web pages; thereby increasing the possibility of the site’s pages appearing at the top of Search Engine Results.

About Mohammad Rahighi

I’m a freelance Web Designer and SEO Expert I have been working as a web designer and Search Engine Optimiser for over 8 years, and have done lots of work over that time. My skills cover many aspects of graphic design, web design, illustration, search engine optimisation (SEO), Social media optimization (SMO) & Search engine marketing (SEM) and other technical knowledge.

‹ What is a web search engine?

How Search Engines Work? ›

Tagged with: Data Mining, Data Tracking, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Techniques, Web Analytics, Web Presence
Posted in SEO