Search engine optimization is one of the biggest trends in the digital marketing industry today, and it’s something that many businesses have been working on. SEO, as it is typically called by industry professionals, is focused on getting business websites to rank on important and relevant search queries so that they see better sales and conversion rates.
The whole concept of SEO is based on the inner workings of search engines, like Google and Bing. Because Google tends to be the most popular and well-known search engine, it has a great deal of influence over the industry of SEO.
So how exactly do search engines work?
Well, it all starts with an algorithm created by the search engine company — let’s go with Google, for the sake of convenience. This algorithm is a method of “ranking” websites in any given search query so that the most relevant and legitmate website will pop up first, and the rest will appear in sequential order.
Search engines have things called “spiders,” “web crawlers,” or “Google Bots.” These web crawlers go through millions and millions of web pages each day and index what they find on those pages. This is an ongoing process, and it’s ruled by whatever is entered into the algorithm.
If a website isn’t indexed properly by these web crawlers, it won’t even appear on search engine results list. If the website is indexed but not all of its important information is made accessible to the crawlers, that website probably won’t be ranked as highly as it could be.
The process of ranking pages is something that constantly changes as more pages are indexed and as search engines improve their algorithms.
SEO definitely isn’t the easiest concept to understand, but it’s just one way to level the playing field and to make sure that all businesses are able to reach valuable customers.