SEO: How it Works
How does SEO work?
To understand the technical details of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we need to first look at how search engines work. Gaining an understanding of how they go about scouring the internet to give you relevant results is crucial to model your own website to get seen by the search engine.
How do search engines work?
Search engines are expected to return relevant link when a user provides a search phrase. To be able to return results with high relevance to the query, search engines perform some critical tasks: crawling, indexing, processing and ranking.
Search engines have software that constantly and automatically “crawls” all the pages which make up the fabric of the internet. These programs are called bots or spiders. With billions of pages available on the internet, these spiders help in tracking how these pages evolve in time.
When a page is arrived at by the crawling process, the search engine now needs to categorize it. This is done by the process of indexing. Much like the indexes we find at the back of a text book, the search engine will analyze the content of a page, and then index the contents. The indexing process is a very critical operation as searching and sorting will involve billions of pages.
Once crawling and indexing have been completed, the search engine is ready to accept requests. When a user queries the search engine, it looks at its index and retrieves all the documents that are listed which are related to the search term. This is known as processing.
Just before the results are given to the user, an algorithm used by Google called Page Rank is implemented. Though the inner details of the algorithm are not known clearly, the purpose of page ranking is to provide relevant results in the first few results that are returned to the user. This is again very crucial due to the large number of documents that are available on the internet which might contain your search phrase, but not exactly the most relevant information.
Due to the large volume of data that search engines need to sort through, all algorithms employed are prohibited from being lengthy. Search engines rely on highly advanced computers to complete these tasks in fractions of seconds. Leveraging these processes to get added search engine visibility is what essentially SEO is.
What are some of the problems websites face?
When spiders and robots crawl a website, they usually follow a set pattern. For example, spiders avoid pages that are considered deep pages. Deep pages are those who are about three or more links away from the home page. Here’s a list of things to avoid in website architecture.
- Avoid deep pages unless they are linked from external sites as well
- URLs should be kept as simple as possible
- Session IDs could hinder spiders from crawling your site as they are often not capable of maintaining this information
- Avoid using frames in your web pages
- Use minimum number of unique links on each as spiders will not go to each link if there are too many on a page
- Pages that are reached via a submit button, drop down menu, log-in or through search are usually not reachable through a spider
Looking at these guidelines we see how SEO actually is a lot more intuitive than one might have previously thought. Now that we have seen what we need to avoid, let us look at what we can actively use to help our site’s visibility.
- Relevance: Content that reflects a keyword many times and appears in the title or subheadings get noticed. The internet being a place of commercial interest, people tried to take advantage by stuffing keywords into content and meta-data. Search engines have responded by modifying their strategy. As a rule of thumb, your content should be unique and relevant to the title you give it.
- Popularity: Democracy has seeped into search engine strategies as well. A simple way they rank your page is to find out how many other websites link to you. And if sites that point to you highly recognized sites, then you get even more brownie points.