How Does SEO Work on a Website?
SEO works by signaling to search engines that your website and its content are the best possible result for a user's search query. This is achieved through a three-step process: crawling (discovering your content), indexing (organizing it), and ranking (deciding where it should appear based on factors like relevance and authority).
Video explaining the SEO process
A Deeper Dive: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking
Think of the internet as a massive library and Google as the librarian. For your website (a book) to be recommended, the librarian first needs to know it exists and what it's about.
1. Crawling
Search engines use programs called "crawlers" or "spiders" to discover publicly available webpages. These bots follow links from page to page, constantly exploring the web to find new and updated content.
2. Indexing
Once a page is crawled, the search engine tries to understand its content. It analyzes text, images, and video files, and stores this information in a huge database called an index. When you search on Google, you're not searching the live internet; you're searching Google's index of it.
3. Ranking
When a user types a query, the search engine's algorithm sifts through its index to find the most relevant and high-quality results. It considers hundreds of factors, such as the keywords used, the expertise of the source (backlinks), site speed, and user experience, to determine the final ranking order.
About the Author
This answer was provided by the experts at AIGrow. We help businesses unlock their full potential with data-driven SEO and web design.
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