What is SEO? How Search Engine Works?

What is SEO?

Full form of SEO is Search Engine Optimization which simply means optimizing and designing your website in the best possible way so that Google and other similar search engines like Bing, Yahoo etc. can read your website properly and based on the quality of your content, design and several other parameters, rank your website in its search results for various relevant keywords which users use to search. So, better SEO of your website means, better search rankings for your website, and eventually more relevant quality traffic on your website. For eg. If you have a Chinese restaurant in India, you will obviously want that when users search with the keyword - "best chinese restaurant in india", your website should appear on top of search results. To achieve this, your website will have to be properly optimized for multiple relevant keyword phrases like - "best Chinese restaurant in india" or "top restaurant in india" etc. which would basically mean -

• Quality content writing and content optimization on your website,
• Technical optimization like writing proper and unique Title, Meta tags of your website,
• Good Layout and design of your website which is user-friendly,
• Mobile / Tablet responsiveness of your website
• And lot of such other technical parameters which Google takes into consideration while ranking websites in its search results.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results.

• Crawling - Process of fetching all the web pages linked to a website. This task is performed by a software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, in case of Google).
• Indexing - Process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.
• Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it, i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.
• Calculating Relevancy - It is likely that more than one page contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.
• Retrieving Results - The last step in search engine activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! often update their relevancy algorithm dozens of times per month. When you see changes in your rankings it is due to an algorithmic shift or something else outside of your control.

Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between their relevancy algorithms lead to major changes in results relevancy.