What is search engine optimization?

There are lots of how to’s and beginners guides to what is search engine optimization? around the web, but if you want to get to grips with the basics here are some of our favourites.

The guides below cover everything from the basics like a how a search engine works, to the reasons why you should invest in SEO for your business and the benefits you’ll gain.

So what is seo really?, Let us begin with defining it.

SEO / Search engine optimization is an algorithm[or a method] that search engine’s [like Google, bing, yahoo …etc] use to search your website for relevant keywords [words typed in Google or other search engines by searchers].

New to SEO? Want to improve your knowledge?

See this beginners guide provided by Google HERE.

Now let us try and explain this process in a simpler way for you.
Think about, how would a librarian or a someone else find a specific book kept in a library?

Let us understand this with an example. Consider a person Mr. A[visitor/reader] visits this huge library looking for a specific book, how would he search for that book?.
There are many ways in which Mr. A can refer to a particular book, which is as follows:-

• By the exact name of the book
• Either by its author
• Or by its genre
• And or by explaining the content of the book

Except for the first scenario in which he might get the exact location of the book immediately, the other scenarios would lead him to the shelf full of books with similar Author, Genre or with Similar Content. This allows him to narrow down the search as against to searching in the complete bookstore and eventually leads him to find the book that Mr. A wants to read.

Similarly, there are ways in which a user can search for a website/business on the search engines. Briefly, there are only 2 to 3 ways in which you can find a website.

• By searching the name / URL of the website
• By searching for the name of the business there are times when your business name and website name might be different [eg. Our company name is Fi Havock Digital P. Ltd. but the website name that we use is www.havock.org which does not include “Fi” & “Digital P. Ltd.” in the URL]. So we will consider them as two different ways of searching.
• Or by searching a term similar to your Nature of business / Type of website / a specific product or service you sell / an article you have written / name of the people mentioned in the site, etc….. but we would term all these terms mentioned in the third point as the website content.

website content is not only the written text material on the website but there many ways of presenting content to your website visitors. Look at the various ways in which you can publish content on digital platforms by clicking here.

In most of the cases, Searching by the name/URL Or by the name of the business would return an exact match, but there are always exceptions. In the third scenario i.e. “Searching by a term” a user might get various different results related to it, which might or might not include your website on the search engine’s first page.

Now we all know that Google shows maximum 10 results per page and a user searching by a term might get 100’s of such pages depending upon the number of websites having content similar to the search term. I know that’s still a bit confusing, Is it? But don’t really worry about 100’s of pages.

If you are here reading this then you definitely want your website to be on the first page of Google. Isn’t that what we always try so hard for? 

According to MOZ, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92% in recent years. Second-page results are far from a close second coming in at below 6% of all website clicks and it only keeps on reducing for rest of the pages.

Wondering how Google ranks those websites?

How would they know which one to show first and so on?

Well if you recollect, at the beginning of this article I did mention about “Algorithm”. This is a highly intelligent super dynamic piece of Code / Software / Logic that helps Google automatically arrange it for you.

“Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it. This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means.”
as mentioned in “SEO Starter Guide” by Google search console.

You can read about the various types of content for SEO on our dedicated blog post here.

Most of these parameters can be handled/optimized by us for our website. The better you optimize these parameters the better it is for your website.
Optimizing these parameters to get your website rank in the top 10 results [i.e. on the first page of Google] is called “Search Engine Optimization”.

See how can you make your SEO hassle free with our new blog post.