The full form of SEO is Search Engine Optimization. It is the method through which you make your targeted audience reach your post/content naturally through the search engine. It also helps in making the search engine understand what your page is all about through the use of keywords, in particular.
To understand this concept, let’s take a practical scenario……
Google, Bing and Yahoo are the search engines that provide us with links to various websites when we type any keyword into the Search textbox. So, how does the search engine display the most relevant links to your audience? Well, the search engine uses what is called Artificial Intelligence. Through this, they crawl and index the pages to look for keywords and matches with the one that the user has typed. The most relevant and popular pages are index 1st, 2nd , 3rd and then on. Ok, this was simple. So, where does SEO fit into all this…We will take another scenario……
Now suppose who own a website and you have written around 20 articles, let’s say on Cloud Services. In all of those articles you might write on various aspects and mention about the impact of cloud computing on various sectors like banking, telecom, etc. You as a writer would always know what your content is all about…..but do you think search engines knows that…c’mon they are just crawlers following a certain algorithm. Instead of focussing on Cloud Services, it might index pages based on the various sectors that you have written about. So, there might be chances that search engines could never show up your pages to the targeted audience, if somehow it is not able to index your content that well.
What happens next is that your content is not that popular because your audience doesn’t know about your pages. It is not because you have not written it well. This is the time when SEO works as a rescuer or in fact as a healer. As a website owner, you do have an option to make your page SEO friendly by including proper tags and keywords for your content. This makes it much easier for the search engine to index your content. The next time your post is crawled, the search engine knows what your page is all about and if your content is of great quality, you might end up being ranked on the top 3.
You might be thinking, if SEO is as simple as it looks above, then why is there so much talk around? To brief you, this is just the beginning. SEO starts with keywords and tags but it does not end there. You have link building, on page and off page SEO; black hat and white hat SEO …and what not. The list might get endless. The simple reason for this is competitiveness. Search engines are getting smarter and efficient, more and more people are writing and publishing content. It’s a neck to neck competition and only the best ones survive.
I hope I have made this concept in much simpler and easier to understand. Once, you understand the basics, it helps a lot when you want to delve deeper. We will get into the technicalities in the later articles. Till then, have a Happy Learning!!!