Introduction To SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the activity of optimizing web pages or whole sites in order to make them search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. SEO encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic, and increase awareness in search engines. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.

SEO isn't just about building search engine-friendly websites. It's about making your site better for people too.

Common search engine principles

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components:

Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages.

Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page.

Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler.

Database – storage for downloaded and processed pages.

Results engine – extracts search results from the database.

Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components.

Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider+Crawler+Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same.

How Search Engine Works?

Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results

1. Crawling - is the process of fetching all the web pages linked to a web site. This task is performed by software, called a crawler or a spider (or Googlebot, as is the case with Google).

2. Indexing - is the process of creating index for all the fetched web pages and keeping them into a giant database from where it can later be retrieved.  Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords.

3. Processing - When a search request comes, the search engine processes it . i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database.

4. Calculating Relevancy - Since it is likely that more than one pages contains the search string, so the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index to the search string.

5. Retrieving Results - The last step in search engines' activities is retrieving the best matched results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser.