Search Engine Optimisation – SEO
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it is the process of optimizing your website to rank them in a better position in SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Because no one cares about the results on the 2nd page.
Why SEO?
- Free
- High-Quality Traffic
- Long Term Results
- Higher ROI
- Higher Conversion Rate
- Better Visibility
- Reach the Right Audience
- Better Position, Better CTR
- Increase in Sales / Revenue
- Brand Awareness
What are the different types of Search engines:-
There are 3 types of search engines
- Directory-based Search
- Meta Search
- Crawler based Search
Directory-based search engines are Human-powered, where the website details have to be submitted manually to the directory. Whenever someone searches for any information in the directory, it fetches the information from its database and serves it to the users.
Examples:- Just dial, Classifieds website, Practo, etc.
Metasearch engines fetch the data from different data servers, combine the results into one list and serve data to the users.
Example:- Trivago.
Crawler-based search engines use Spiders or Crawlers to find websites on the internet, read(Scans) the content, and store the details in their data centers. Whenever someone performs a search in these search engines, it pulls out the data from its data center, ranks the websites, and serves the information to the user. The Information that you find in these search engines is not real-time data, it uses the cache data.
Example:- Google, Yahoo
How do Crawler based search engines (Google) work?
Before you search, web crawlers gather information from hundreds of billions of web pages and organize it in the Search index.
Google search works in 3 steps
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Serving/Ranking
Crawling is a process of discovering publicly available web pages across the internet using the software known as web crawlers. These crawlers scan the web pages and understand the website content and bring back the data to Google servers.
Indexing is all about organizing the information on web pages in data centers. When the crawler scans the web pages, it takes a screenshot of the web pages, understands the web page based on content, keywords, freshness, and other factors, and stores that information in the index which is also called data centers.
Serving/Ranking is a process of fetching the information from the Google data center, ranking them based on the algorithm or formulas or ranking signals, and serving the results (Web Pages) to users.
For more Details:- Google Search – Discover How Google Search Works
When Google launched its search engine, it used to have only one ranking factor called Page Rank.
Page Rank is the first formula used by Google to rank web pages based on the number of webpages links pointing(recommending) a web page. PageRank was named after Larry Page, one of the founders of Google.
Later when the webmasters or website owners started misusing the formula or taking advantage of the formula to rank their website in SERP like buying backlinks, exchanging links, getting links from low-quality websites, Google started adding more updates and started tweaking the algorithm.
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At present, Google has more than 1500+ formulas to rank web pages in Google search.
SEO Techniques:-
The techniques used by webmasters to rank their webpages in SERP(Search Engine Results Page)
- White hat – Following all good or ethical practices while optimizing web pages
- Back hat – Following all bad or unethical practices while optimizing web pages
- Grey hat – Following a mix of both black and white hat SEO techniques.
Webmaster Guidelines:- This is a list of algorithms or formulas listed by Google for webmasters which are divided into 2 parts.
- General Guidelines (Do’s) – Consists of all the good practices to follow which will help Google to understand, index, and rank web pages.
- Quality Guidelines (Don’ts) – Consists of a few bad practices which webmasters should not implement and make sure they don’t get impacted by the Google penalty.
For more details: Webmaster Guidelines – Search Console Help
What happens when you follow or implement Black hat or unethical practices to rank your website:-
When Google identifies any website or a web page following unethical practices to rank their web pages, Google penalizes that website which is also called a Google penalty by which the complete website will be removed from Google index. This means the user can no longer find that website in SERP until the webmaster cleans up the website and submits a reconsideration request to Google.
Here are a few case studies of websites that got penalized by Google:-
10 Big Brands That Were Penalized By Google, From Rap Genius To The BBC