We often hear businesses working day in and out to improve their website ranking on search engines. That does make sense, doesn’t it? Without visibility among the target audience, there is no meaning in having a digital presence. And, if there is anything that can help make that possible, it’s SEO – search engine optimization. Wondering, What is SEO?

In simple terms, SEO amplifies the chances of your website occurrence when someone looks for products or services related to your business online. So, you get free of cost organic traffic landing right on your website every month.

All you must do is, get in sync with the search engines’ algorithm and enjoy the perk of high visibility among your users. But before taking any step further, it is imperative to understand the working of these search engines. Fair enough?

So, let us dive a little deeper into the world of search engines and the way this works.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

The easiest answer to define search engines is to consider these as libraries for storing copies of the different web pages.

Therefore, to search through its vast database, users must type their keywords (queries) into their selected search engine. In return, the search engine goes through the saved pages in its index to find the most relevant results. And all this happens with the help of the algorithms defined specifically for each of these engines.

Undoubtedly, Google has got the most reliable algorithm being the most popular search engine out there. Oh yes, no one knows the complete program on which the searches work within Google. The good news is that the company does offer some glimpse of what really matters for SEO.

Such as, the query words that are often termed as keywords, relevance as well as the usability of pages, location and many other settings. When returning the results, the Google algorithm applies varying weight to each factor according to the type of your query entered.

For instance, when looking for current topics, Google considers news as the best match. Similarly, when searching for research, the search engine returns studies and academic papers to the users.

You must have got an idea of how a search engine works? If that is so, let’s move on to SEO and it’s working.

What is SEO and How Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

As already mentioned, SEO works to ensure that your content is visible. In other words, it encourages Google’s algorithm to choose your content when searching for the keywords related to your business.

So, why am I stressing over Google and not Bing? There is nothing personal. By far, Google is the most popular choice with over 92% market share worldwide. Knowing that, isn’t it wise to just focus on one search engine instead of stumbling around and going nowhere?

Hence, if you are looking to increase your Google ranking, you must optimise your web pages accordingly. Precisely, there are many factors that come into play. For instance, crawlability, responsiveness, page loading speed, backlinks and more.

Let’s find out briefly about the major factors helping increase web pages visibility.

Crawlability

This is how Google knows that your webpage exists. So, it’s very important to align with this factor to get a place within this search engine’s pool of web pages. The engine makes use of Spider, a computer program to crawl websites.

Consider, you have created a new website. So, how would Google know about it? Well, it will simply use Spider to find out about the newly launched sites. In short, Google picks up all the links from the pages it already knows to find the new ones.

Responsiveness

According to a study, Google’s highest searches come from mobile phones, cumulating to 61 percent.

Therefore, in 2018, the company switched to mobile-first indexing. Now you know why it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly website.

Page Loading Speed

To ensure that the users are happy, Google likes to return the web pages that are faster when loading.

Backlinks

Page ranking on Google depends on the number of backlinks you have for your web pages. The greater the number of links to your page, the higher is your page rank. Hence, the better is your chance to be picked by Google anytime.

The Conclusion

That was a brief introduction to SEO and it’s working. However, this is not it. To properly put everything in practice, you must delve a little deeper. With proper techniques, you can certainly help your pages rank on top Google results. So, practice and explore what is SEO to improve your website performance.