The process of driving relevant traffic to a website through search engine optimization, or SEO, is known as organic search engine ranking. Since organic search is one of the ways through which people find content online, higher rankings can translate to higher organic traffic to a website.
SEO includes both technical and content contemplation aimed to align with the best search engine algorithm needs. Common tasks associated with SEO include creating high-quality content, optimizing content around specific keywords, and building backlinks easily.
In other words:
Enhancing a website's position in the organic (free) portion of search results is the main goal of SEO.
The main benefit of ranking for a tangible keyword is that you can get “free” traffic to your site, month after month easily.
How Search Engines Work
Do you know how search engines like Google actually work ?
How did you arrive at this conclusion? Most likely, you typed in a search query like "What is SEO?" or something similar, and the search engines took care of the rest.
When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine figures out the “best” result.
Exceptionally, Google scans its index of 'hundreds of billions' of pages in order to find a set of results that will best answer your search because Google always aims to show the best results for its users.
How does Google decide which result is the "best"?
Google remains coy about its ranking prosody but based on expert research and a few indications from the search engines; crawlers or bots are used to gather information available on the internet. Through the use of internal and external links, website navigation, and bot comprehension, search engines provide the pages with the highest visibility as the top results.
Even though Google doesn’t make the inner workings of its algorithm public, based on filed patents and assertion from Google, we know that websites and web pages are ranked based on:
Topicality
If you search for “Cat food” you don’t want to see web pages about truck tires.
Search relevance refers to the measure of the exactness of the relationship between the search query and the intended search result. Domains with accurate, rapid, and pertinent results get prominence from the search engines and hence rank top.
That’s why Google looks first and foremost for pages that are closely concerned with your keyword.
But Google does more than just place "the most relevant pages at the top." This is so because every search query has thousands, if not millions, of related pages.
For example, the keyword “Cat food” brings up 1,940,000,000 results in Google.
Importance of Search Relevance
Imagine landing on a site and it provides a clear mismatch between your anticipation and the search result. It exposes such a site as both unprofessional and unreliable.
Statistica indicates a whopping 68% of people are disagreeing with returning to a site with poor search experience. In this consideration, aim to build personalized, highly relevant, and target-driven content that meets search intent.
Thus, they rely on three additional algorithmic components to arrange the results in a way that pushes the best results to the top.
Authority
As the name suggests, authority refers to Google's algorithm for determining the reliability and accuracy of the material.
The entire reputation and impact that a domain possesses in a particular area is referred to as authority. Google evaluates a website's authority depending on how widely accepted it is within the target niche.
To put it another way, how does Google determine whether a page is authoritative?
They consider how many other pages link to that particular page.
(Links from other pages are known as “backlinks” it's very famous in SEO.)
In general, the more links a page has, the higher it will rank easily.
(In fact, Google’s ability to measure authority via links is what separates it from search engines, like Yahoo, that came earlier on it.)
Importance of Authority
A website's ability to provide value is what gives it authority. To put it briefly, other players in your field are aware of your experience, respect your viewpoints, and regard you as a thought leader.
This way, other websites easily connect to your websites through backlinks. Google explains this as a vote of confidence and is likely to assign higher rankings.
Usefulness
Content can be topical and authoritative. But if it’s not useful, Google won’t want to locality that content at the top of the search results.
Time and again, Google has been unambiguous in calling for ‘quality over quantity’ for best search results. Appropriateness refers to providing engaging, relevant, and valuable information to website visitors.
In fact, Google has publicly said that there’s a dissimilation between “higher quality content” and “useful” content.
For example, let’s say that you search for “keto diet”.
The first result you click on (“Result A”) is written by the world’s foremost expert on keto . And because the page has so much quality content on it, lots of people have linked to it easily.
Importance of Usefulness
Most businesses scramble for top rankings on SERP; through organic traffic or paid. High rankings fascinate interest and get more visibility, resulting in high conversion rates and brand authority.
Usefulness underlines the standard of organic traffic in fully satisfying search intent. Organic traffic in itself shouldn’t be the end goal.
How do you want users of your site to interact? Buy a product, seek your services or follow a recipe? Meeting these goals requires you to offer appropriateness aligned with the user intent.
But the information is utterly disorganized. Furthermore, a lot of jargon that most people don't comprehend is used.
Compare that to another outcome, denoted as "Result B."
It’s written by someone comparatively new to the Paleo Diet. And their website doesn’t have nearly as many links pointing to it.
However, their content is organized into individual sections. And it’s written in a measure that anyone can understand:
Well, that page is going to rank highly on the “usefulness scale”. Even though Result B doesn’t have as much trust or authority as Result A, it will still fulfill well in Google.
(In reality, its ranking might be higher than that of Result A.)
Google measures appropriateness largely based on “User Experience Signals”.
To learn more about backlinks, please read this article : What is Digital PR and Why It’s Important for SEO and Link Building Strategy
In other words: how users interlude with the search results. If Google sees that people really like a individual search result, it will get a significant ranking boost:
#1 SEO Tip for Higher Rankings
Build a website that users adore!
Search engines are designed to measure various signals across the Web so they can find websites that people like most. Play right into their hands by building those signals real and not artificial.
It's now time to put all of this knowledge into practice with a comprehensive SEO tutorial.
How SEO Works
Whether it's Google, Bing, Amazon, YouTube, or another search engine, SEO works by optimizing your website for that particular engine.
Specifically, your job is to make sure that a search engine sees your website as the overall best result for a person’s search.
How they determine the “best” result is based on an algorithm that takes into account authority, relevancy to that query, loading speed, and more things.
(For instance, Google's algorithm comprises more than 300 ranking variables.)
In most cases, when people think “search engine optimization”(SEO), they think “Google SEO”. This is why we’re going to focus on optimizing your website for Google in this guide.
Organic vs. Paid Results
The organic and sponsored results areas of search engine result pages are divided into separate sections.
Organic Search Results
Natural" or "organic" search results are results that appear naturally and are ranked entirely on the basis of merit.
In other words, there’s no way to pay Google or other search engines in order to rank higher in the organic search results.
Search engines rank the organic search results based on numerous ranking factors. However, in general, organic results are recognized by Google as the most relevant, trustworthy, and authoritative websites or web pages on the subject.
I have more niceties on how search engine algorithms work later on. But for now, the significant thing to keep in mind is:
When we discuss “SEO”, we’re talking about ranking your website higher up in the organic search results.
Paid Results
Paid search results are ads that come on top of or underneath the organic results.
Paid ads are completely uncommitted organic listings. Advertisers in the paid results section are “ranked” by how much they are intending to pay for a single visitor from a particular set of search results (known as “Pay Per Click Advertising”).
Why Is SEO Important?
To put it briefly, search generates a TON of traffic.
In actuality, the following summarizes the sources of the majority of website traffic:
As you can see, search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube account for more than 60% of all online traffic. Overall, traffic from search is ten times higher than that from social media.
Let's use an example to highlight the significance of SEO.
Assume you are the owner of a party supplies business. Every month, 110,000 individuals look for "party supplies" on Google Keyword Planner.
Given that 20% of all clicks go to the first result on Google, appearing at the top of the search results might bring 22,000 unique people to your website per month.
Let's calculate the value of those visitors, though.
For that particular search term, the typical marketer spends roughly $1 per click. It implies that the value of 22,000 visitors' monthly web traffic is about $22,000.
Only for that specific search term, too. You can rank for hundreds, even thousands of keywords if your website is optimized for search engines.
Search engine traffic has a far larger value in other areas, such as insurance or real estate.
For instance, advertisers are shelling out more than $45 for each click on the query "auto insurance price quotes."
Conclusion:
I hope you found value in this brief introduction to SEO. Rather than just providing a simple definition of search engine optimization, I aimed to offer practical steps to initiate your journey.
Undoubtedly, there is a wealth of information to absorb regarding SEO. However, given its potential to attract targeted traffic, investing time and effort can yield significant benefits.
My recommendation is to begin with the fundamentals: ensure search engines can thoroughly crawl your site, then focus on crafting keyword-optimized content, and utilize outreach strategies to acquire backlinks.
These three steps serve as the cornerstone of effective SEO.
Once you feel confident in mastering these fundamentals, you can explore more advanced techniques such as YouTube SEO and optimizing for voice search. These additional strategies can further enhance your online presence and visibility.