SEO: How Does It Work?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an internet marketing technique aimed at improving a website’s presence by ranking high in a search engine results page (SERP). To better understand SEO, you first have to know how search engine sites work.

A search engine site is a program that searches the Web for information based on a given keyword. It presents its findings through a list of links to webpages containing the queried keyword.

The list can go from the hundreds to the thousands, and are ranked according to their relevance to the word or phrase keyed in. Obtaining a high rank on the list is crucial because it provides searchers with a path to websites. The higher a website ranks in a SERP, the greater the chances of being visited by the site’s target audience.

One known technique that can make for effective SEO is improving external and internal links. External links introduce new users to a site by linking the site on other webpages. Internal links, on the other hand, guide searchers to other pages in the same site. Both are needed to produce more backlinks, which are essential to improving a website’s visibility.

High quality content is also known to increase a website’s ranking. Relevant and useful content encourage visitors to revisit or share a page. It is also one of the measures used by search engine web crawlers in finding results for a search query, and thus is necessary to making a site visible to these crawlers.