What Is SEO? How Search Engines Rank Websites and Important Ranking Factors.
Understanding SEO
Unfortunately, ‘gurus’ in the online marketing field have created the following false notion: search engine optimization is hard and requires a lot of technical expertise. This is not true; the truth is as follows: you do not need to hire a $100 per hour ‘expert’ (emphasis on the ‘expert’) to optimize your website for a search or even land on the coveted first three spots of the search engine results page.
I am creating an SEO series to better understand SEO. I will later show you how to optimize your website, content, and pages for search, land on the first page of Google, if not the first 3 spots, and drive tons of traffic to your website. All you need to do is pay attention to specific aspects of your website. Aspects of this SEO series seek to show you how to optimize. Before we get to that, it is only right that we commence by cultivating SEO and its importance and look at how Google and other search engines rank websites.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is exactly what the name suggests: it is the aspect of optimizing or twerking web text, images, and videos to affect organic search engine visibility.
Now, you may be wondering, “Why? Why should I bother with SEO?” Well, one of the reasons why SEO is such an important aspect of website traffic and why search engine optimization is a big business is as follows:
Optimizing your website content, i.e., optimizing your text, video, and image content, affects how search engine spiders (not actual spiders but a generic term used to refer to search engine algorithms (called web crawlers) that periodically crawl and index web pages in order of relevance to search queries) view your website and the position they place it in their index. The more visible your content is to these ‘spiders’, the higher your website ranks on SERPs. The higher a page or piece of content ranks, the more traffic it receives.
Search engine optimization takes into account what users search for (the keywords they type into their search boxes), how search engines index websites and the content therein, and, most recently, how relevant they are.
How Search Engines Rank Websites and Important Ranking Factors
The World Wide Web is a vast information forest. Naturally, in a forest, it is easy to get lost. Enter search engines. Using the forest as an example, search engines serve two major functionalities: create an index of all trees in the information forest and provide forest visitors with a detailed path to the tree species they want. This sounds oddly technical so let us simplify it as follows:
Search engines use web crawler algorithms to crawl all the information placed on the internet and create an index. Then, when users use search engines to search for information, search engine spiders take the keyword, match it to information on their index, and return the most relevant information within a matter of seconds. This resource by Google, aptly named “How Search Works,” should give you further insight into the inner workings of Google search. If you are into visuals, this infographic by ppcblog.com should demystify Google search.
To determine relevance, web crawler algorithms use several factors. User-friendly content is for users and user queries.
In general, SEO involves optimizing your website design by making it easier for users to interact with content on various devices, using relevant keywords, and creating links between your website and other relevant, high-quality sites on the same topic, as well as, as of May 2015, the mobile-friendliness of your site.
Important Google Ranking Factors
According to backlinko.com, one of the most proficient SEO websites, Google uses over 200 ranking factors; some of these factors hold more weight over others. In this SEO series, we shall outline the most relevant ranking factors that Google and other search engines used to rank websites in 2024 and shortly thereafter. To make this list easier to follow and to build up on how to rank first on Google aspects we shall look at later, we shall categorize these factors: on-page factors, off-page factors, user optimization, backlink acquisition, and site-wide factors.
We shall touch on each of these factors and look at how to optimize them for search in my subsequent blogs. I hope you enjoyed this piece of information shared. Kindly share to reach a larger audience, and let’s expand SEO education.