It goes without saying that nowadays SEO or search engine optimization is a need for businesses. Just having a functional website is not sufficient, Without online visibility, most of the potential client will not be able to find your business. In fact, a business is non-existent online if it is not ranking higher on search engines. 

Today I will discuss what is Search Engine Optimization AKA SEO. In this post, I will answer these questions about SEO.

1- what are search engines?

2- how do search engines work?

And

3- If you want to rank your website on search engines then- out of hundreds of SEO factors, which are those three most important factors that you can work on to get results faster?

Feel interested? Continue reading then 🙂 …

There are many search engines, such as Yahoo, Bing, YouTube and so on… But In this video, we will talk about the Google search engine, because…

“ On average, Google receives over 63,000 search queries, every second! ”

And…And according to Statista reports July 2019, Google accounts for 88.61% market share, and that means, Google is a strong Search Engine Market Leader, so it is worth to discuss Google search engine optimization.

what are search engines?

A Search engine works based on a software system that responds to your search query with web pages that best answers to the search term that you entered in the Google search bar.

Let’s understand this with an analogy of a librarian. You can think of the search engine as a librarian. You go to a librarian and ask for a book on subject X. She goes back to the library database and comes back with a book or some books around the topic you are looking for, which she thinks will best help you!

The search engine also works pretty much the same way! You enter a search query, let’s say, for example- best coffee near me or- best restaurant in Adelaide.

Just on a click, Search engine comes back with the results that best answer to your search query.

But, you may be thinking…how do search engines do this, how it is able to answer your query with appropriate web pages? 

How do search engines work?

The search engine performs these three actions in order to present the appropriate web pages in answer to your search query.

Crawling

Indexing

Ranking

Let’s understand these ones by one.

Crawling

Search engine bots crawl millions of web pages through hyperlinks. Bots are small software bundles, they crawl and scan millions of webpages and they go from one page to another through the hyperlinks on a page. (hyperlinks are the clickable links on a webpage)

Indexing

Search engine bots crawl millions of web pages through hyperlinks. Bots are small software bundles, they crawl and scan millions of webpages and they go from one page to another through the hyperlinks on a page. [hyperlinks are the clickable links on a webpage]

As these bots crawl pages they categorize them into different categories. The search engine database is full of millions of web pages organized into different categories.

Ranking

Now when you enter a search query into the search bar of Google, it answers your query in the best possible way with the results that it displays on Search engine pages. 

And they do it by matching the webpage content with your search query and rank the web page based on relevancy and other factors.

Now you must be wondering, what are those factors that Google considers to rank web pages. And what can YOU do to rank your website on the search engine?

Three most important SEO factors

By the way, there are hundreds of factors that Google considers when ranking a web page, such as relevancy, the meta title, and other meta tags, content on the page, images, links and so on. But today we will talk about the most important THREE factors that you can work around to rank your website and still get the most out of it.

Content

Content is king when it comes to search engine optimization. You have to have really good content. Content that is useful to the users. Your content should solve the user’s query. 

Or in other words, when planning content for your website, you should aim to serve the purpose of your target market. You should specifically and clearly convey what your product or services are, and how your business can help your target market.

Not only that, but you should also provide the answers to the questions that your target audience may have around your products. In essence, You should address the problems of your audience and offer solutions through your content.

Let’s understand this with an example.

For example, if your website is about YOGA. You can cover the questions like:

What is the best time to do yoga?

What kind of clothes one should wear for yoga?

What are the best yoga poses for beginners?

What are the advantages of doing yoga?

How many times in a week one should do yoga?

You can address problems around yoga, such as:

How can yoga help with obesity?

Can you do yoga if you have a back problem?

Can yoga help with arthritis?

The best strategy is to cover and answer as many questions your target audience may have. So that once a user is on your website he/she gets all of the questions answered and there is no need to search for another site.

This will help search engines to answer the search queries around yoga through your web pages to users.

Meta tags

Meta tags help Google bots to understand what the webpage is all about. The most important is the page title, the main heading H1 tag, followed by meta description and other headings.

Make sure that you insert the primary keyword in your meta tags.

Having headings and subheadings not only helps the bots but they also help human visitors to understand your content easily. 

A meta description- a small snippet that you see on the search result page will help users to get an idea of what information the page contains inside and whether to click on it.

You can use the meta description like an elevator pitch to attract users to click on your page. Because more people clicking on your page, in turn, improves your ranking too.

Performance

Your website needs to render fast. It’s good that a website has great content, and passing all the right signals to Google bots, but if it takes time to load then it hampers the performance.

Google is also a business, and its aim is to serve its users with the most appropriate results in the shortest span of time. So, you will automatically do well if you try to help Google in serving the users faster and better.

A web page should ideally load in up to 3 seconds or faster. Ask your developer to make your site load faster, and mobile-friendly. 

Google came up with mobile-first indexing in 2016 and they now use mobile-first indexing for over half of the pages shown in search results globally.

If you be careful about these three factors, you will do much better in optimizing your website.

I always keep these three factors when optimizing any content, what do you focus the most for your content?

If you have more questions related to SEO, post them in the comments below and I will respond to them so that everybody can benefit from it.

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