Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in organic (or “natural”) search results, thus making your website more visible to people who are looking for your product or service via search engines.

  • SEO is part of the broader topic of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific keyword or phrase.
  • Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the page. So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines? On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your product or service.
  • Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your website's ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers. Then about paid search, you can pay to have your website listed on the search engines. However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if you don't know what you're doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine users never click on paid search ads anyway.
  • Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and useful information, it is in everyone's best interest (for the search engine, the searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.

How does a Search Engine Work?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

  • Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).
  • Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.
  • Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, e., it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.
  • Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.
  • Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings, it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else beyond your control.

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in the relevancy of results.

What is Search Engine Rank?

When you search any keyword using a search engine, it displays thousands of results found in its database. A page ranking is measured by the position of web pages displayed in the search engine results.

If a search engine is putting your web page on the first position, then your web page rank will be number 1 and it will be assumed as the page with the highest rank. SEO is the process of designing and developing a website to attain a high rank in search engine results.