SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization. It is a course of action which influences the visibility of a website in the search results of a Search Engine. SEO assists to boost Search Engines in finding and ranking your website higher than the thousands of other available website, thereby helping your website in getting more traffic from the Search Engines. If a website shows up in the search result list more often, then it will get more visitors from the users of the Search Engine. Besides, SEO may also aim at local search, video search, image search or academic search.
How does a Search Engine works?
Basically a Search Engine is driven by texts. It does not consider a beautiful design or a soothing sound or an amazing video clip. Rather, it crawls through the Web and search for texts to find out what actually the site is all about. Besides the text, the Search Engine also carries out various other functions to give search results. These include a series of functions such as crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy as well as retrieving.
1.Crawling:
First and foremost thing Search Engines do is Crawl the web and judge the contents available there. This is done by software known as Crawler or Spider. The work of these Crawlers is to follow the links from page to page and index whatever comes in their way while following. Besides, due to the availability of so many websites, it is not possible on the part of the Spiders to visit every site regularly just to see whether a new page has been added or if some contents have been altered. Since, these Spiders do not consider images or clips, so it is advisable to remove those if you have inserted many of them in your websites.
2.Indexing:
After this step the next process is to Index the contents of the website. The pages which are indexed are assembled in a huge database which makes it easier to retrieve those later. Indexing generally refers to determining the expressions and words that explains the webpage appropriately and allocating specific keywords for that page. Furthermore, it is convenient for search engines to assign higher rankings to web pages if they are properly optimized.
3.Processing:
In this stage, the Search Engine processes a search request that comes its way that means it makes a comparison between the page which is indexed in the database and the search string present in the search request.
4.Calculating the Relevancy:
After that, the Search Engine begins calculating the relevancy of every web page which it has indexed with the search string as it is possible that the Search Engine may contain more than one web page. Since different algorithms are present for calculating the relevancy having similar components such as Meta tags, keyword density, links, etc., so various search result pages having similar search string are shown by the Search Engines. Moreover, as the significant Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo!, etc. keep changing their algorithms from time to time, so you need to be upgraded with their latest modifications in order to be at the topmost position in their list.
5.Retrieving:
The final stage in this process is retrieving the results of the Search Engine. Usually it is just showing those in the web browser that means the numerous pages of the search results are arranged as per the most significant to the least significant websites.
Hence, the Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important factors for increasing your website’s ranking, which in turn will help you in leveraging your site’s popularity to greater heights.