What Are The Basics Of SEO?

SEO Basics

We are going to begin to describe the fundamentals of SEO by explaining what search engines do, what Google does, and what is search engine optimization or SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Welcome Friends to MY STYLE BIO. If you are craving to know about SEO you are at the right place.

What does a search engine do?

Before starting to optimize a site, it is very important to understand what exactly the search engines do. In this part, we explain how search engines find your website and what are the basics of SEO .

Search engine – Terminology

We will often write "Google" when referring to a search engine. Of course, there are many other search engines, such as Bing,  Yahoo, Baidu or  Yandex. Since Google is the most used search engine on the Internet, our posts will be focused on it, and when we talk about a search engine, we will refer to Google.

How does Google find your site?

Search engines like Google follow links from one web page to another and consist of an agent or robot (web crawler), an index, and an algorithm.

A crawler follows the network links searching the Internet 24/7. It stores the HTML version of a page in a gigantic database, called the index. This index is updated every time Google recrawls a website and finds a new or revised version of it.

Depending on the Website's traffic and how many changes are made, Google recrawls it more or less frequently. We can control this frequency through a file called sitemap.xml, which we will explain in another post.

What the robot does is enter a website, collect some data, identify the links of that site and finally follow them as a user would do to repeat the process over and over again.

In this way, the robot is jumping from one link to another and browsing different pages from which it is collecting data with which to feed its database.

Google's Secret Algorithm

After indexing the website, Google can already show it in the search results. Google has a specific algorithm that decides in which order the pages should be displayed. How this Google algorithm works is a secret. No one knows exactly what factors determine the order of search results.

Furthermore, the factors and their importance change very often. Testing and experimentation give us a relatively good feel for the most important factors and changes in these factors.

Google results page

The Google results page shows the links to sites that best fit the search performed. We refer to these results as organic search results. Depending on the search performed, we will have more or fewer pages with more results.

Above these blue links, normally, two or three payment links appear, these links are advertisements. People pay Google to put these links at the top of the organic search when they search for a specific term. This is SEM (Search Engine Marketing) , which we will address in another post.

The value of links to search engines

It is important to understand how Google and most search engines use links, it is part of the basics of SEO. They use the number of links pointing to a page to determine the importance of that page. Both internal and external links could help the positioning of a website in Google.

Some links are more important than others. links from websites that have a large number of links are generally more important than links from small websites with few external links.

There are different ways how links can help you rank better. They are other fundamentals of SEO that we will discuss in our Link Building chapter.

Universal search

Along with organic and paid results, Google also incorporates news, images, and videos into its search results. This integration is called universal search.

What is search engine optimization?

SEO is the profession that tries to optimize sites to make them appear high in organic search results. To do this, SEO tries to adapt the information of a website to the Google algorithm.

Although Google's algorithm remains secret, SEO experience gives us a pretty good idea about some of the most important factors. In our opinion, the factors used in the Google algorithm can be divided into two categories:

• On page SEO: within the website. There are factors on the page that decide the ranking of the website. These factors include technical issues (eg, the quality of your code) and text issues (eg, your site structure and text, word usage).
• Off page SEO: off the website. There are external factors to the page. These factors include the links to your site. The more (relevant) sites link to the website, the higher its ranking in Google.