SEO backstage

SEO is a contraction of Search Engine Optimization.  What exactly is SEO? This article will give you a very basic idea how the search engine operate in order to make SEO possible. Suppose you are at your personal computer and you want to find a particular thing on the internet. You log onto your favourite search engine and type what you’re looking for and Voila! One million results! Images, news, websites and what not! Pause, rewind, now once again in slow motion. You’ve typed what you are looking for. Let’s stop time for a moment. What’s going on inside? What’s on the search engine’s mind? Where are the words that you just typed going to travel? Let’s dive in.

Behind the search button or the enter key is a vast algorithm that’s ever ready to process the words you just entered. This algorithm is also called the search engine robot, bot, web crawler or the spider. We’ll call it spider as it makes more sense talking about the web. The spider’s job is to find and bring sites to the SERP or the Search Engine Results Page. The search engine companies have already taken care of this. The spider is programmed to understand your keywords and match it against web content.  The spider algorithms are yet evolving to find superior methods to enhance web user experience.

SEO in a webmaster’s perspective is basically getting his or her website higher ranking on a search engine. It’s all about knowing the mind of the web spider and making sure a site gets higher priority when processed by its algorithm. The web spider like every other programme runs on logic. It initiates with what you type. The spider essentially has to deal with the words you type. It wouldn’t have the intuition to understand the meaning behind the words nor would be able to derive what exactly is on your mind.  That’s why the backbone of SEO is keywords.

Now that we have a holistic idea about the whole process, we’ll go into more specific details. First we’ll see how the spiders deal with keywords. The search engine companies are generally very secretive about their algorithms. Their constant updates make the optimization a very dynamic process over time. Any way the spider in general operates as follows. 

The spider always deals with textual content. May it be an image or a graph, the spider always considers the textual portion attached to them. The spider roams around the internet, gathers information and then stores that information on an index. Next the index is sorted and once sorted in a particular order, the information is sent to a huge database. Then another programme called the query processor compares the words that you entered with the database and displays the most relevant web pages on the SERP. This simply is the whole idea of SEO, having the keywords, more links to the site, meta tags and proper titles with keywords, the sites can rank higher.