Seo what is it how does it work

Search engines have spiders — not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind. These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site. They collect things like page speed , title tags , social signals , internal linking , backlinks , and so on.

With over ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.

The on-page factors are exactly what they sound like: Things that are actually on the page. This includes title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags, internal linking, and more. Off-page factors , meanwhile, are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites. You now know how SEO works. How can you make SEO marketing work for your business, though? And by work for you, we mean help your company increase its rankings and traffic, plus its online revenue.

Check them out! WebFX is an SEO agency that has many years of experience optimizing client websites to make them more attractive to search engines. Call or contact us online today for a free evaluation. Learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages. We offer webmaster guidelines for building a Google-friendly website. While there's no guarantee that our crawlers will find a particular site, following these guidelines can help make your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site.

Sign up for Search Console. The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site for search engines, organized by topic. You can also download a short checklist in PDF format. The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it.

The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap. Google also finds pages through links from other pages. Learn how to encourage people to discover your site by Promoting your site. A robots. This file, which must be named robots. It is possible that pages blocked by robots.

You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.

For more information on robots. Read about several other ways to prevent content from appearing in search results. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block showing just the URL, no title link or snippet if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet like referrer logs.

Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots. In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don't mind if any user with a link can reach the page.

For real security, use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely. When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does.

For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site's robots. This can result in suboptimal rankings. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site. Choose title text that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.

A page's meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's meta description tag might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph. Meta description tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages in Google Search results.

Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Adding meta description tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. Learn more about how to create quality meta descriptions.

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search result. While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search , and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

Having a different meta description tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain for example, searches using the site: operator. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting meta description tags probably isn't feasible.

In this case, you could automatically generate meta description tags based on each page's content. Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins. Structured data is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages. Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful and eye-catching ways in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business.

For example, if you've got an online store and mark up an individual product page, this helps us understand that the page features a bike, its price, and customer reviews. We may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries.

We call these rich results. In addition to using structured data markup for rich results, we may use it to serve relevant results in other formats. See a full list of supported content types. We recommend that you use structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content. Once you've marked up your content, you can use the Google Rich Results test to make sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation.

If you want to give structured markup a try without changing the source code of your site, you can use Data Highlighter , which is a tool integrated in Search Console that supports a subset of content types.

If you'd like to get the markup code ready to copy and paste to your page, try the Markup Helper. The various Rich result reports in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific type of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the past 90 days.

It also shows any errors we've detected. Correct structured data on your pages also makes your page eligible for many special features in Google Search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, and more. See the gallery of search result types that your page can be eligible for. Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to crawl and index that content, and to refer users to it. Different content for example, different products in a shop as well as modified content for example, translations or regional variations need to use separate URLs in order to be shown in search appropriately.

The hostname is where your website is hosted, commonly using the same domain name that you'd use for email. Google differentiates between the www and non-www version for example, www. Path, filename, and query string determine which content from your server is accessed.

The hostname and protocol are case-insensitive; upper or lower case wouldn't play a role there. A fragment in this case, info generally identifies which part of the page the browser scrolls to. Because the content itself is usually the same regardless of the fragment, search engines commonly ignore any fragment used. The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want.

It can also help search engines understand what content the website owner thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site. All sites have a home or root page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors.

Unless your site has only a handful of pages, think about how visitors will go from a general page your root page to a page containing more specific content. Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page. Many breadcrumbs have the most general page usually the root page as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right.

We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup when showing breadcrumbs. A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site.

While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors. Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure. Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal search functionality to be found.

Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. When using JavaScript to create a page, use a elements with URLs as href attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction. Include a simple navigational page for your entire site or the most important pages, if you have hundreds or thousands for users.

Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines discover the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their primary content's last modified dates. Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. Having a custom page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience. Consider including a link back to your root page and providing links to popular or related content on your site.

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content. Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words. If your URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts:. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web, going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them in an index. Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should appear in the search results for a given query.

In our library analogy, the librarian has read every single book in the library and can tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions. Our SEO success factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user experience. For example, content quality and keyword research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and speed are important site architecture factors.

The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index. This index is used at the final ranking stage.

When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. A web page might not be placed in the index if:. The third step is really the most important step, and that is ranking.

Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps are complete. So once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked.

There are more than ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization.

Some examples of signals that search engines use to rank web pages are:. Google also has a machine-learning search engine sub-algorithm called RankBrain :.