What is SEO and how does it work?

I’m one of the people you talk to when you call us here at Bluehost. Have you ever wondered how to help more people find your website? Well, here Bluehost, we host almost 2 million websites and we have a lot of experience. Helping clients successfully increase web traffic. One of the best ways to do this is through what’s called search, engine optimization or SEO. For short, the goal of this article is to give you a basic overview of how search engines work, so you can better understand what search engine optimization or SEO is all about.

Let’s get started as of today, there are over 130 million registered websites out there on the internet to sort through all of it. Most of us rely on search engines to find what we want, and these search engines have become so good that over 90 % of people using the internet rely on them to find things now, there’s lots of good search engines out there, but about 83 % of People worldwide use Google.

So that’s what we’ll use in this article just keep in mind. The concepts were discussing applying on all the other search engines too. When you search for something with Google, you get back a results page and there’s lots of stuff on it. This shows you how many websites, Google found that are probably relevant to what you’re looking for here. Companies can pay Google to place ads for when people search for particular things, but this is the section most people care about it’s the actual results list, which is just a list of websites that are most likely to contain what you’re looking for and you’ll notice.

This is just the first results page. You can click down there for more now. Here’s the important part that most people just don’t know over 94 % of people that use Google. Only click results on this first page if they don’t find what they’re looking for. They usually don’t bother clicking on subsequent result pages. Instead, they typically prefer to just adjust their search terms and start from scratch and of those people who do click on that.

First page, most only click in what sometimes referred to as the golden triangle, or top three or so results, in fact, about 63 % of people just click right in there. This is why optimizing your website for search engines or doing SEO is so important when people search for something that’s relevant to them, and they see your website in their search, results, they’re, going to click and visit your page, and these aren’t just any visitors.

These are people that are looking for exactly what you offer so of anyone they’re the most likely to convert into customers, subscribers, etc. But if your website isn’t showing up towards the top 3 results or so or if it isn’t, even on the first page, it’s almost like your website doesn’t exists. No one can even find it now. In our example, we search for California sandals, and we got back about twenty.

Two million website results. It’s not exactly a small number. Have you ever wondered why some websites show up on this first page and others are stuck way down at the bottom of the pile? Well, a site’s position in search results is determined by what’s referred to as PageRank. Every website has a ranking for particular search terms or keywords. In the beginning, the first search engines worked by tracking all the words on web pages.

So if you searched for California, sandals you’d get back a list of websites containing those two keywords and the websites that had those words most often were ranked higher and they showed up towards the top of results pages well. In 1996, two Stanford PhD students notice, while they were researching academic papers. That sources that contained a lot of keywords didn’t necessarily mean that they were more relevant.

What matter? A lot more was whether those papers were cited, often by other papers, so they applied this citation concept to web search. They suggested websites that were backlink Talaat, that is to say, we referred too often by other websites, were more likely to be relevant. That’s how Google was born search engines today all follow this model. They still look at your website’s keywords, but they then rank your site’s relevance on the number and quality of backlinks to it from other websites.

So think of it. Like this keywords, let’s Google see your site and know what it’s about backlinks determine how much Google trusts your site to be relevant. So keywords are important because they tell Google you’re out there, but backlinks move your website up the food chain. That’s why the search results. You see are called organic or natural results, they’re constantly changing, based on what people actually do out there on the web.

Unsurprisingly, as there are the two aspects to how search engines find and drink pages, there are two corresponding components to SEO. First is the on-site component. This is where you ensure your site is full of keywords that are relevant to what your site’s about. So, for example, if you sell sandals in California, you want to make sure relevant. Keywords are on your site, like sandals California, Ocean Beach, flip-flops shoes, leather sand, things like that.

The second component of SEO is called off-site SEO. This is where you work to create backlinks to your website that originate from other sources. Links to your site can be created using articles, social media, blog posts, discussion, boards and so on, but keep this in mind the more influential or legitimate the website is that links back to you, the more effect that backlink from that site. It’s going to have on your search result ranking, so that’s it SEO is super important because it helps you move to the top of relevant search results and since almost everyone relies heavily on search engines to find anything online SEO is the most effective way to increase Traffic to your site, good SEO takes time.

So the sooner you start the swing you move up the results ladder to learn more about SEO. Read our next article: how to grow your business with SEO and visit our Help Center or feel free to give us a call. We have SEO specialists standing by to help you and, as always like subscribe or follow us to get the latest info tips and special offers.