Have you ever thought about how to help more people find your website? Well, one of the best ways to do this is through what's called search engine optimization, or SEO for short. The target of this article is to give you basic knowledge of how search engines work so you can better understand what search engine optimization or SEO is all about.
Today, there are over 100 million registered websites out there on the internet to sort through. Most of us rely on search engines to find what we need and these search engines have become so important that over 90% of people using the internet rely on them to find things. Now there are a lot of good search engines out there but about 80% of people worldwide use Google so that's what we'll use in this article. Just keep in mind the concepts we're discussing applying on all the other search engines too.
When you search for something with Google you get back a results page, and there's lots of content on it, this shows you how many websites Google found that are relevant to what you're searching for here.
Users can pay Google to place ads when people search for particular things, but this is the section most people care about it's the actual results list which is just a list of websites that are most likely to contain what you're looking for and you'll notice this is just the first results page. You can scroll down there for more but now here's the important part that most people just don't know, over 90% of people that use Google only click results on this first page if they don't find what they're looking for. They usually don't bother clicking on subsequent result pages instead they typically prefer to just adjust their search terms and start from scratch, and of those people who do click on that first page most only click on what is sometimes referred to as the golden triangle or top three or so results in fact about 60% of people just click right in there.
This is why optimizing your website for search engines or doing SEO is so important, when people search for something that's relevant to them and they see your website in their search results they're gonna click and visit your page, and these aren't just any visitors, these are people that are looking for exactly what you offer so of anyone they're the most likely to convert into customers.
But if your website isn't showing up towards the top 3 results or so or if it isn't even on the first page it's almost like your website doesn't exist.
Now in our example, we search for beach sandals and we got back about 260 million website results.
Have you ever wondered why some websites show up on this first page and others are stuck way down at the bottom of the pile? Well, a site's position in search results is determined by what's referred to as Page rank. every website has a ranking for particular search terms or keywords, the search engines worked by tracking all the words on web pages so if you searched for beach sandals you'd get back a list of websites containing those two keywords and the websites that had those words most often were ranked higher and they showed up towards the top of results pages.
In 1996 two Stanford Ph.D. students notice while they were researching academic papers that sources that contained a lot of keywords didn't necessarily, mean that they were more relevant what mattered a lot more was whether those papers were cited often by other papers, so they applied this citation concept to web search they suggested websites that were backlink to say we referred too often by other websites were more likely to be relevant. That's how Google was born as to search engine. today all follow this model, they still look at your website's keywords but they then rank your site's relevance on the number and quality of backlinks to it from other websites. So think of it like this, keywords let Google see your site and know what it's about backlinks determine how much Google trusts your site to be relevant, so keywords are important because they tell Google you're out there, but backlinks move your website up the food chain, that's why the search results you see are called organic or natural results, they're constantly changing based on what people actually do out there on the web.
Unsurprisingly as there are two aspects to how search engines find pages, there are two corresponding components to SEO, first is the on-site component which is where you ensure your site is full of keywords that are relevant to what your site's about. So for example, if you sell sandals in California you want to make sure relevant keywords are on your sites like sandals, California, Beach, and things like that.
The second component of SEO is called off-site SEO, where you work to create backlinks to your website that originate from other sources links to your site can be created using articles, social media, blog posts, discussion boards, and more. But keep this in mind, the more influential or legitimate the website that links back to you the more effect that backlink from that site it's gonna have on your search result ranking.
So that's why SEO is super important because it helps your website or blog move to the top of relevant search results, and since almost everyone relies heavily on search engines to find anything online, SEO is the most effective way to increase traffic to your site.
