The Website Race!
When you ask a question to Google, do you ever wonder how it decides which websites/articles are most relevant to answer your query? Out of the million web pages available on the internet, how can it always find the correct solutions to your questions?
The technology behind these answers is Search Engine Optimization. In this article, you will learn about SEO, what website factors are considered in SEO, and how it works.
Table of Contents
- What is SEO?
- How Google ranks websites?
a. Content
b. Title
c. Structure
d. Synopsis
3. What happens behind Google ranking?
a. Crawling
b. Indexing
c. Ranking
What is SEO?
The method to increase the traffic on a website on a search engine result page is called SEO. Search engines are software that has millions of web pages/articles/blogs/videos published on the internet. Some popular search engines are Google, Yahoo. Their job is to input a user’s query(what we type on Google) and output the most relevant data to answer the question. SEO is responsible for deciding the website’s position after a search query.
If I were to write about SEO with a real-world example, imagine you are writing an examination. All other website owners are your competitors. The query a third person asks on Google is your question paper. The content you have developed is your solution. The results shown for the query are the examination results. Your rank will depend on how well you have prepared for the test. Now the professor who corrected your papers is SEO! It will decide how much you score and where you stand. So, make sure you don’t forget to follow the rules your professor teaches you!
How Google ranks websites?
Google mainly focuses on four major factors to decide a rank for the website- Content, Titles, Structure, and Synopsis.
Content:
Imagine I develop a website for the recipe of mango milkshake, and I write my reviews for Friends TV show on the website. The idea itself sounds strange, right? That is precisely what Google looks for in a website. It checks if the content is relevant to the purpose of the website. It also checks if the content is copied from other websites. In that case, the website’s rank will drastically drop down, or it might even get blocked. So next time you develop a website, make sure what you write is unique, relevant, and helpful for the users.
Title:
You must have noticed that some statements on websites have bigger fonts or bolder colors. These statements are the title for what lies below them. Titles give readers an idea of what to expect from the content ahead. Therefore, they should be interesting, relevant, and clear to understand.
Structure:
How would we feel if we were sent to an unknown city without taking help from any person/ device? Completely lost and irritated. That is just what users feel when they land on a website with no proper structure. If the website has multiple pages, proper and accessible navigation should be provided to traverse through all pages. At no point should the user get lost on a website.
Synopsis:
A synopsis is the conclusion of the entire web page. Irrespective of the content and titles, a website is incomplete without a proper ending. Each web page must-have synopsis of the entire content to remind the user of what he has read throughout.
What happens behind Google Ranking?
Now you must wonder, all this is fine, but how does Google read these factors from millions of websites? It uses bots(robots) to understand these factors.
Google mainly ranks websites in these three steps — Crawling, Indexing, Ranking.
Crawling
Every day there are thousands of new websites published on the net. There must be some mechanism to go through all websites as quickly as possible and then decide where they should start in search results. Bots are made to go through every word of each website’s webpage once they are hosted. This is where crawling occurs. They start crawling from the first page of the website. On the way, if they find links to other pages in or outside the website, they crawl that page and keep taking short notes of what they find on each page. While doing this, they try to build a hierarchical map of the website to understand what exactly is placed where. The entire process of reading the website is called Crawling.
Indexing
Once crawling is done, there is a need to understand how many websites exist for a particular topic. For this, search engines use index tables. Index tables can be understood as tables that contain a summary of all websites available on the web. They contain their names, website URLs, the pages in each website, and the summary of each page. Using this, whenever the user searches for a thing, it can quickly identify the websites related to the query. Indexing can be understood as regular index pages of books we read.
Ranking
Note that crawling and indexing occur before any search query is made. They are done as soon as a web page is hosted on the web, irrespective of whether a user has searched about it. However, Ranking occurs after a query is placed. Based on what the user searches, search engines rank websites according to their relevance. For this, they consider the factors we discussed earlier and refer to the index table to make decisions.
Now you know what SEO is and what happens behind a search engine. You must be excited about how you can implement it on your website. The following article will focus on implementing SEO on the website, its types, and the ethical ways of doing it right.
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