How does seo work

The more people using the search engine, the more ads they can show and the more money they can make. Make sense? The Internet has really put the world at our fingertips. We are usually not more than a few clicks away from almost any information we could be looking for. When people are looking for information, services, products, and so on, they go online. Odds are you clicked on one of the first few results, at least initially.

Odds are, they are loving you for not putting up a fight. So now you know why search engines work so hard to provide you with great results and why you should care, we can talk about how SEO works in a little more detail. Search engines have spiders — not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind. These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site.

They collect things like page speed , title tags , social signals , internal linking , backlinks , and so on. With over ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.

The on-page factors are exactly what they sound like: Things that are actually on the page. This includes title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags, internal linking, and more. Off-page factors , meanwhile, are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites. You now know how SEO works. How can you make SEO marketing work for your business, though? And by work for you, we mean help your company increase its rankings and traffic, plus its online revenue.

In addition to daily news stories from our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes daily articles from expert contributors that cover SEO issues mainly from an in-the-trenches perspective. In addition to covering SEO generally, Search Engine Land also has search engine optimization areas specifically for the major search engines:. Subscribe to our daily brief newsletter for a recap of all the latest SEO-related news, tips and tactics from Search Engine Land and other sources all over the Web.

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While SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles do not. We can break SEO into three core components or pillars that you need to be familiar with — and action regularly:. Search engines are used by people when they have a query and are searching on the internet for the answer. Search engine algorithms are computer programmes that look for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for. Search engines rely on algorithms to find web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword.

There are three steps to how search engines work: crawling , which is the discovery stage; indexing , which is the filing stage; and ranking , which is the retrieval stage. The first step is crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. So if you have a blog post and it's linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link to follow and may follow the link to your new blog post.

The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index. This index is used at the final ranking stage. When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index.

A web page might not be placed in the index if:. The third step is really the most important step, and that is ranking.