How SEO works

How SEO works

You might think of a search engine as a website you visit to type (or speak) a question into a box and Google, Yahoo!, Bing, or whatever search engine you're using magically replies with a long list of links to web pages that could potentially answer your question.

That's true. But have you ever stopped to consider what's behind those magical lists of links?

Here's how it works: Google (or any search engine you're using) has a crawler that goes out and gathers information about all the content they can find on the Internet. The crawlers bring all those 1s and 0s back to the search engine to build an index. That index is then fed through an algorithm that tries to match all that data with your query.

What goes into SEO?

To understand what SEO really means, let's break that sentence down and look at the parts:

The quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when really you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead, you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.

The quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better. For knowledge about SEO, SMO training and services Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.