WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND HOW IT WORKS

BY IMERU WAMBUI

WHAT IS SEO

SEO refers to techniques that help your website rank higher on organic search results.

SEO allows you to reach those consumers who are searching the web for content that is relevant to your business or service.

Ranking High on Search Engines

The number one objective of search engines is to provide you with the most relevant results possible in relation to your search query.

The main 2 areas that search engines determine what your website is about and how to prioritize it to show on the SERP when a query is entered include

1. Content on your website

2. Who is linking to you

There are 3 elements that a Search Engine considers when determining where to rank your website on Search engine results page-SERP

1) Rank- it is the position your website falls on in the SERP when a specific query has been entered. It indicates how relevant and authoritative your website is in the eyes of search engines.

2) Authority- it determines how authoritative and credible your website content is through the following factors calculating how many inbound links it has, how authoritative the websites that link to you are and how old is your domain name

3) Relevance- they look for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a specific search query entered. They are looking for the following, actual text on your webpages, website structure, page formatting, use of keywords in your URLs, body text, webpage titles and headlines

How Search Engines Works

1. Search query is entered, every search engine has bots that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and following links on each webpage to other webpages

2. Search engine looks into its index for the most relevant information for your search query

3. Displays the results on the search engine results page-SERP

4. The order is listed from the most relevant and authoritative

Google receives over 77,000 searches per second according to Internet Live Stats. Every Search engine has proprietary methods to gather and prioritize website content this process is called indexing. Your website should be indexed and optimized for keywords and phrases that are relevant to what your business is offering.

By optimizing your site content for the search engines and using relevant keywords that help describe your product or service offering can help you bring more targeted traffic to your site and reach more qualified buyers online.