What is SEO?
Search engine optimization or search engine optimization is the process of improving a website’s visibility on the first pages of search engine results (SERPs) for a targeted set of keywords/key phrases. The higher the position of a web page on search results pages, the more “visible” the page will be.
How do search engines work?
Search engines use algorithms to calculate the relevance of a page to a related search query. There are hundreds of factors on which they are ranked (Google uses more than 200 ranking factors) to calculate the ranking of a particular page (based on a rating scale from 0 to 10), which is one of these factors.
Google assigns a specific ranking to each web page it crawls, and when another website links to your site, the page ranking on your site increases. The more sites that point to your site, the higher your site’s page ranking with search engines, and the more trust your site has in search engines.
- Crawl
Search engines use bots or “spiders” to crawl billions of pages across the web by following links they find from billions of pages around the web to explore and place in search engines.
- Indexing
Search engines store and index your site’s content in their index. - Classification
When you enter a search query or when a person searches for something, the search engine searches the matching pages in its index, then sorts and displays the results that are most relevant to the user. The order in which the pages are displayed is calculated by the search engine algorithms, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors. Each page is then given a ranking score.
In order to rank highly in search engines, your site needs to rank higher than all other sites eligible to appear in a query that someone searched for if you have the same content.
However, be careful if you use shady methods and try to deceive search engines. You are expected to give your site a very low ranking and you will not be able to appear again.
Google search engine and its very strict rules on sites that try to manipulate their rankings are the biggest evidence of those penalties and if this is discovered, your site will be penalized and removed from SRPs for example “Google Slap”.
Here are some Google algorithms for ranking content in search engines
Google constantly updates the algorithms it uses to rank major sites every year, and when it does, many sites suffer a drop in rankings while many other sites enjoy an increase in rankings, the most prominent of these algorithms.
1- Panda (2011)
Lower the rankings of low-quality sites.
2- Penguin (2012)
Lowering the rankings of sites that engage in shady SEO.
3- Hummingbird (2013)
Updating relevance graph and knowledge graph (semantic search).
4- RankBrain
Machine learning.
