How does SEO work? – Learn SEO

Search engines have two roles:

  1. Crawling websites and building Index
  2. Providing users a list of websites that are the most relevant to the search made

Crawling and Indexing

Imagine the city of London as the Internet and each stop on the underground as a webpage, with you traveling the train as the search engine.

If you were traveling from Wimbledon station to Kings Cross, you would want to find out the best route to get there.

It’s the same concept for search engines traveling around the web; the search engine is trying to discover the best way to crawl around the web.

What’s Your SEO Score?

How do search engines decide which is the best route?

Search Engines use a number of ways to decide what the best route is and, essentially, who will rank above who depends on the keyword searched.

Keywords

If you were searching online for a gardener in London, it wouldn’t really help if all that appeared online were Hair Dressers in Glasgow.

The search engine’s job is to crawl your website and understand what your website and each page is about.

If you want to be found online by people who are searching for “gardeners in London” online, the obvious thing to do is add the keyword ”Gardeners in London”.

But what if they search the term ‘London based gardeners’?

Or ‘Gardening Company in London’? Search Engines have become smarter in detecting similar searched words, but there is nothing more effective than having the specific key word in your content.

Content Writing (blogging)

Are you wondering how many ways you can add a keyword on your page without it looking ridiculous or reading badly?

This is where blogging comes in. Blogging is just writing more interesting content on your website. If you write about other things within your industry, you have more of a chance to get spotted online by potentially more obscure online searches.

Another reason to do this is if you regularly write content, you will have more chance of the search engine visiting your website on a more regular basis.

It’s almost like having a shop selling the same things every single day.

Eventually, you will know what’s in the shop and potentially stop visiting it. If the shop added new things on a regular basis, you might end up visiting more often to see what’s new.

There are many ways you can help search engines understand what your website is about and to help you get higher up on rankings.

If you want to learn more about keywords and how to alter your website to help Search Engines find you keep an eye out for my On Page SEO blog which will be released at the end of May.

Trustworthiness of your website

Search Engines also want to know how trustworthy your website is.

You can become trustworthy as your domain ages or by other websites letting search engines know you are a trustworthy website.

How do they do that? It’s called backlinking.

A backlink is a link of your website on someone else’s website. They could add your link for a number of reasons: maybe it’s a reference in an article or even to promote your services.

Whatever the reason is, search engines do spot this.

This helps search engines determine how relevant and trustworthy your website is.

If people are sharing your website or information on your website, it suggests the information you are providing is important and helpful, therefore you should be higher up on the search rankings.

These points are the fundamentals of how SEO works. Understanding how to put everything together is the next step. Whether you try to learn SEO yourself or employ an external company I would suggest for you understand the fundamentals to help you on your online marketing journey and get the best possible results.

SEO does take time, as essentially it takes search engines a long time to trust your website before you start ranking up higher.

Sometimes it can take years to get to where you want, especially in industries that are highly competitive.

We would always suggest to use SEO as part of an overall marketing strategy to help build your business.

This could include networking, cold calling, or paid advertising with linkedin or other social networks.

If your budget is tight, try to spread the cost around all advertising streams and don’t put all your eggs in one basket as your website being high up on Google doesn’t necessarily mean you will get business.

Marketing is all trial and error and to become successful, you probably will have to fail numerous times.

Want to find out how your website is performing? Click here to find out for FREE!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jai Shah

Digital Marketing Expert

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