SEO

SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from a search engine’s organic results. 

The benefits are obvious: free, passive traffic to your website, month after month . But how do you optimize your content for SEO, and what “ranking factors” actually matter ? To answer that, we first need to understand how search engines work.

• How search engines work

How search engines work

Search engines are like libraries for the digital age.

Instead of storing copies of books, they store copies of web pages.

When you type a query into a search engine, it looks through all the pages in its index and tries to return the most relevant results.

To do this, it uses a computer program called an algorithm.

Nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work, but we do have clues, at least from Google.

Here’s what they say on their “How search works” page:

To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query – for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.

Speaking of Google, this is the search engine most of us use—at least for web searches. That’s because it has the most reliable algorithm by far.

That said, there are tons of other search engines you can optimize for.

Learn more about this in our guide to how search engines work.