Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is the backbone of your blogging efforts; it’s how visitors will find your content. SEO is an incredibly subjective topic, and many experts have varying opinions. Some view SEO as a science, others consider it an art, and some see it as a bit of both. Make sure to use a SEO strategy for your website, read more on how to use SEO.
Whenever you search for something in Google or Bing, you see a list of articles and web pages related to your query. Search engines catalogue the entire internet and determine that these pages are the most relevant to you based on what you search.
The first thing to understand about SEO is that the purpose of a search engine is to show helpful and relevant information to users. Companies like Google and Microsoft are constantly working on improving their search algorithm. If they show you unhelpful things, you’ll stop using them and switch to a competitor.
Most SEO discussion revolves around Google as it is the most used search engine worldwide with a 92% market share, facilitating billions of search queries daily. However, search engines like Bing and Yahoo shouldn’t be ignored as millions of people still use them daily.
How Search Engines Work
Without getting too technical, search engines work by cataloguing the internet. They do this by crawling, indexing and ranking web pages.
Crawling: Search engines run scripts that constantly crawl websites, images, videos, PDFs and other content formats looking for new or updated content. How you build your website can significantly impact how well search engines can crawl your website. A website that isn’t developed according to best practices, is poorly organized or has broken links can be difficult for crawlers to index correctly or fully.
Indexing: After crawling and discovering web content, search engines process the content on your website and organize the information in a giant database known as an index. When you submit a search query in Google, it isn’t searching the web; it’s searching the index, which is why you see results so quickly. Well-structured and well-written articles are easier for search engines to process, which is another reason why quality is so important in the blogging business.
Ranking: After discovering and indexing your website, search engines need to evaluate how your site compares with others, which is done through a process called ranking. Websites with a higher rank will be shown higher in the search engine results. How search engines rank websites is a tightly guarded secret that few know. However, there are many educated guesses on how they rank sites. The SEO industry generally agrees that the two major factors impacting website ranking are backlinks and visitor engagement.
To learn more about SEO, I recommend starting with the following resources:
Make sure you’re revisiting the subject of what you’re writing about throughout the body of your posts. For example, this post was about SEO, search engine optimization. We want to include SEO plenty of times throughout the body of the blog post. Try different methods to find what works for you then make it happen.
