What Is Search Engine Optimisation?

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a broad term used to refer to a process of optimising your website in order to increase its visibility & ranking on search engines.

To understand this, let us assume that we are searching for some information related to coffee beans.

We begin our search by typing ‘coffee beans’ in Google search. After processing, it returns to us something that we call a Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

It typically comprises 10 hyperlinks to the websites that have some information about coffee beans, a set of Frequently Answered Questions (FAQs), rich snippets showing us information at a glance and lots of other stuff.

Now, these are not the only 10 websites that contain content about coffee beans. In fact, as you can see above, there were about 32700000 results for this particular query.

Google ranks all these websites in order to show us only the relevant results.

So what is SEO? It is to optimise your website in order to make its position among these top 10 results so that the website is visible to the user whenever she/he makes the search!

How do you actually optimise your website for search engines?

And moreover, how to get started with it?

That’s the purpose of this guide.

We will learn how we can optimise the website in order to be visible to users on the web. But before that, let’s talk briefly about the history of Search Engine Optimization.

History Of Search Engine Optimisation?

The history of SEO dates back to 1996-1997 when the internet was at its peak. There were many search engines back then including Yahoo!

Typically, these search engines acted like directories where you could submit your website and list it under a specific category. These listed websites were not ranked and were always in some particular order such as alphabetical.

These search engines, however, gave opportunities to the businesses looking to advertise. Businesses were required to pay in order to get listed at the top of the directory.

The reason why Google succeeded was its revolutionary algorithm and its system for online advertisement. As soon as Google released its page rank algorithm, businesses quickly realised that this can be a great opportunity if their websites were good enough to “please” the algorithm so that it gets ranked at the top and that too for free!

Since then neither optimising for the algorithms has stopped nor Google’s quest to rank only better websites.

How Does SEO Work?

Google search engine is a machine that is being run by algorithms. These algorithms check for various things in the website such as its content, speed, mobile-friendliness, and 200 other factors! 

After evaluating all these factors, the algorithm decides the ranking position for the website.

The goal of SEO is to make sure that the website is doing good on all of these factors.

It should be noted that Google’s search ranking algorithm is a close-guarded secret. You can never know what all of those factors are. Otherwise, everyone will be trying to spam the internet and users won’t get the most authentic information.

While most of the ranking factors are unknown, the majority of these revolve around some basic factors. If you do good on those basic factors, you are automatically doing good on the rest of the factors.

For example, many factors are used to determine the quality of the website content. If you make sure that the quality of the website content is high then you don’t have to worry about all of the factors.

Similarly, there are other basic factors too that we will be talking about in this Beginner’s SEO series in order to give you a head start into the SEO field.

SEO is a long term process as Google takes time to rank websites. You have to be patient with SEO. But the results it drives are long term without you having to pay any money to Google.

SEO is the cheapest yet most powerful marketing channel as it continues to drive your online business without anyone in the driving seat!

Successful Businesses Using SEO

The power of SEO can be gauged from the fact that people are using search more than ever now. Google receives 3.8 million searches per minute! That number is huge.

Imagine tapping into this opportunity and reaching out to all the people who are actually looking for your business.

Businesses leverage SEO every day for their growth. Take Amazon, for example, every day people search for products and Amazon shows up at the top and sells products to them. Search for any movie and you will find Netflix at the top.

Search for anything and you will find some website showing up to you. Remember there is SEO behind this website and that’s why it is at the top.

The reason why SEO is powerful is because you are reaching out to consumers at the exact time, place, and moment! No marketing channel has allowed this before.

Your coffee website shows up to someone only when they are looking for the coffee, otherwise, why would they search?!

SEO, when done right, is a GOLD MINE!

So, let’s jump right into SEO and learn how to actually do it.

Search Engine Code Team

Search Engine Code Team is comprised of SEO experts and strategists having more than 20 years of combined experience. We keep testing and delivering knowledge of SEO for the community of SEO.