How does seo work

How Does SEO Work?

What is SEO and how does it work? Learn more about how marketers use search engine optimization to rank higher and increase traffic.

Loren Baker

Loren Baker

You may have heard that SEO is essential when you want to increase traffic to your website.

When you are looking to increase the volume of customers coming to your store, incoming calls, and online orders, you need to be visible in Google Search.

Optimizing your webpages helps you rank higher and convert more searchers to customers.

But how does SEO work?

In this article, you will learn about the process used by marketers to optimize your website for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many others.

Let’s start by learning what SEO is all about.

What Is SEO, Anyway?

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

At its core, SEO is the process of making your site rank as highly as possible in Google when someone types in [burrito blanket] (or whatever it is you sell, promote, or talk about).

The higher your site ranks, the more visible your business is, and the more traffic and sales your business is likely to generate.

You might be a little lost if you are just getting started in SEO.

There are many sites, books, and guides (we even wrote one here at Search Engine Journal) to help you get started. But you might find that many resources offer conflicting information.

Part of the reason SEO frustrates so many people is that it changes continuously.

Why? Because when marketers get their teeth into a new “strategy,” they like to run it into the ground.

Essentially, we are why we can’t have nice things.

SEO is a never-ending battle to get more eyes on your website and convince Google that your site is worth sending searchers to.

How Does SEO Work? Your Top SEO Questions, Answered

So, what matters when it comes to SEO?

Before diving into the more technical aspects of SEO, I will answer the most-asked questions about SEO.

Is SEO Dead?

Yes. It’s completely dead.

Our jobs are over. You should just quit now.

I’m kidding, mostly.

I’d argue that SEO is constantly dying repeatedly. Think of it like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

Strategies we’ve come to know and love get replaced by newer, more effective ones. SEO best practices die, and new ones are reborn.

So while it isn’t dead, SEO is always changing. If you want to succeed at SEO, you’ve got to be willing to roll with the punches.

What Is The Most Important SEO Factor?

There isn’t one golden SEO factor that outranks all the others.

One of the most common answers you’ll get in SEO is, “Well, it depends…”

This might be frustrating, but it’s the truth.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

How Long Does SEO Take To Work?

Well, it depends. (Sorry!)

Only Google knows exactly how its algorithm works.

They release updates, and there are a few lists of the most crucial ranking factors.

The truth is that SEO takes as long as it takes – that might be weeks or even months, depending on your strategy.

If someone else does something just a tiny bit better, you might get bumped off the top of the SERPs.

What Is The Difference Between On-Page SEO & Off-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to changes you make on the site you own that impact SEO.

Off-page SEO refers to SEO strategies that happen off your website, such as building links to pillar content.

Link Building Is Hard – Can’t I Just Buy Links?

You could. You could also run your hand through a blender. No one is going to stop you. But it’s often an ineffective SEO strategy.

Rather than buying links, I’d recommend starting with our guide to link building.

SEO Factors That Rule Today & Beyond

Now that we’ve covered the basics, you are ready to get your hands dirty.

Below, we’ll cover a few of the most critical SEO factors.

Keep in mind that SEO trends change constantly, and what works now might not work in a few months.

Relevant, High-Quality Content Wins

There are many technical SEO factors – site structure, anchor text, URL structure, and so forth.

Those details matter, but the backbone of SEO is high-quality content. If you get that right, the rest of SEO will be much easier.

If you want to crack the first page on Google, you need relevant, well-optimized content that earns links.

What do we mean by high-quality content?

Here are a few things to keep in mind when developing content:

In short, ensure that all your content is written for humans first and optimized for Google second.

Metadata Matters

Metadata is the title and lines of text on the search results page.

For example, if you Google [who killed Carole Baskin’s husband], here’s the metadata you’ll see:

Metadata tells the user what they can expect to find if they click on the page.

Optimizing your metadata is pretty simple:

Think of metadata as ads for your content.

Why should users click? What can you tell them?

Use the meta to encourage clicks, which will drive traffic and lead to more business.

Links Matter, But…

Links have been a critical aspect of SEO as long as Google has existed.

Links work as ‘votes’ telling Google that other sites think your content is useful and relevant.

The more high-quality, relevant links you acquire, the higher your site will likely rank for related key terms.

In short, links are still fundamental to SEO.

But, quality matters more than quantity.

If you invest in link building as part of your SEO efforts, target links from topically relevant, popular websites in your niche.

User Experience (UX) Impacts Rankings

User experience (UX) plays a substantial role in how well your website will rank on Google.

However, user experience depends on many factors like site infrastructure and layout, content, and so forth, making it hard to measure.

If you want to win at SEO, UX should be a top priority.

Here are a few best practices to follow:

As Google becomes smarter, UX will likely play an even more important role in the future.

So now is the time to learn the basics and implement best practices on your site.

Mobile Matters More Than Ever Before

In 2018, Google moved to mobile-first indexing, which means the search engine uses mobile versions of your site to rank your sites in their results.

Google’s move makes sense because more than 50% of traffic worldwide is generated from a mobile device.

What does that mean for SEO?

First, Google suggests investing in responsive design. You must make your content consistent across desktop and mobile devices and ensure your site loads fast on mobile and desktop.

In short, you need to up your mobile game or site to languish at the bottom of Google search results.

Don’t Ignore Voice Search

When it comes to voice, there’s a lot of conflicting information out there.

Google said, way back in 2016, that voice searches made up around 20% of all searches performed in the Google app.

Today, over a quarter of all Americans own a smart speaker. Yet 72% of marketers have no plans to optimize for voice search.

Does voice search matter? It does.

Voice search has grown in popularity and will likely continue to do so. It shouldn’t be your #1 SEO priority, but it does make sense to start optimizing for voice search.

Most of the voice search optimization strategies also make sense for semantic search.

Here are a few steps to help optimize your site for voice search:

Voice search optimization is not a must-have right now, but voice search optimizations make sense for Google in general and may give you a leg up in the future.

3 Tips For Actually Succeeding In SEO

There are two types of SEO advice: the technical stuff I covered above and the core principles of SEO. The technical stuff will change, but these SEO tips stand the test of time.

If It Seems Shady, It Will Probably Burn You

You might have heard of black hat, white hat, and gray hat SEO.

Black hat SEO refers to the practices that are totally against Google’s terms of service.

Like building 10 sites and interlinking them to make Google think your crappy bitcoin sites are legit.

This is where the acronym PBN comes into play.

Then there is a gray hat, which may not be technically wrong but walks a thin (gray) line.

White hat is above the board, totally legit SEO. Some have convincingly argued that a white hat isn’t a thing anymore.

A lot of SEO pros walk the gray hat line. And a lot of them get burned.

To succeed in SEO, you need to do things the right way.

If something feels off – like buying or selling links – it will probably burn you and torpedo your chances in search.

Trust me. It is not worth the long-term risk.

Read Real Experts

There are a lot of SEO “experts.”

Some of them claim to get you to the top of page one on Google “guaranteed!”

Others don’t actually do SEO but write about it a lot. Make sure your sources are reputable.

Take everything you read with a grain of salt because nothing is universal.

What works for an ecommerce site in tech isn’t necessarily going to work for a restaurant supply store.

Pay attention to what comes from Google directly from folks like John Mueller and Gary Illyes.

Test, Test, And Test Again

SEO is about determining what works for your site in your industry based on your unique landscape.

The only way to figure that out is to test – and keep testing repeatedly.

If you’re using shady tactics, all your work may go to waste if Google’s latest algorithm update changes things. But if you apply SEO best practices and consistently test, you can be prepared for when the winds change.

Testing is an eternal part of any successful SEO strategy.

Conclusion

SEO is ever-evolving.

Every SEO professional would love to find the magic formula that rockets their sites to the top of SERPs and keep them there forever.

Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t work that way.

There are rules and best practices, but SEO’s core is figuring out what works for your site or client and then changing it when it stops working.

My final advice is this:

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

The Definition of SEO in 100 Words or Less [FAQs]

Search engine optimization (SEO) seems pretty straightforward. You pick a few keywords, and voilà! Your page is optimized for SEO, right?

Many people understand the basic principles of SEO, but a lot has changed in the last decade.

The SEO that we know and love today is not the same SEO that we knew and loved (or hated) 10 years ago. And that’s why SEO is something marketers should continue to define, and redefine. Here’s a brief definition in under 100 words:

What Is SEO?

What hasn’t stayed the same are the techniques we use to improve our rankings. This has everything to do with the search algorithms that these companies constantly change.

Here are some other frequently asked questions about this critical practice today.

How Does SEO Work?

SEO works by optimizing a website’s pages, conducting keyword research, and earning inbound links. You can generally see results of SEO efforts once the webpage has been crawled and indexed by a search engine.

Looking deeper: There are a ton of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages, though. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links (also known as backlinks). And that’s just to name a few.

Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.

What Is an Organic Search?

Organic search refers to someone conducting a search through a search engine and clicking on a non-paid result. Organic search is a search marketing channel that can be used as part of inbound marketing to increase website traffic.

What Is SEO Strategy?

An SEO marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO includes on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords; and off-page strategies, which earn inbound links from other websites.

To satisfy intent and rank well in the long term, build your SEO marketing strategy around topics, not keywords. If you do that, you’ll find you can naturally optimize for important keywords, anyway. Understanding your target audience (aka buyer personas) and what interests them is key to attracting relevant visitors to your website through search engines.

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is unpaid traffic that comes from search engines such as Google or Bing. Paid search marketing does not increase your organic traffic numbers, but you can optimize your website using inbound marketing software to gain more visitors.

Looking deeper: One of the biggest changes in the last decade is the way other user behaviors shape the SERPs a user sees on search engines. And today, social media can have a big impact on your organic traffic trend line. Even just a few years ago, it didn’t make a difference who was finding your content through social search. But now SEO takes into account tweets, retweets, Google+ authorship, and other social signals.

Social search also prioritizes content and people that are connected to you. That could mean through a Facebook friend, Twitter follower, or connection through another social network. Sometimes social search will even prioritize content that has been shared by an influencer. Social search understands that you may be interested in content that your network feels is important to share, and therefore it’ll often get surfaced to you.

This all means when you’re thinking about your SEO strategy, you need to think about how your social media strategy fits into the puzzle, too.

What Is Direct Traffic?

Direct traffic consists of website visitors that come to your website by typing the URL into their browser, rather than coming from another website, a search engine, or social media.

SEO actually takes into account whether or not your visitors are staying on your website and engaging with other content. If you rank well for a keyword and attract a visitor who isn’t relevant, it won’t actually help your website.

Think about your visitors and the content they are looking for more than how many people you can attract to your website.

The Importance of SEO

SEO is important because it helps people find information and discover pages on the world wide web. SEO is especially important for businesses as it ensures they’re answering their audience’s biggest questions on search engines, while driving traffic to their products and services.

Looking deeper: In the past, SEO success was measured by whether or not you were ranked high on the first page of Google. But even if you ranked well for a term, does that actually mean you’re going to see results?

Not always. You might rank really well for terms that aren’t ideal for your business. So you appear high on search engines, get a ton of traffic, but then your website visitors realize your company isn’t what they were looking for. You don’t convert customers from this traffic, and ranking high for this particular keyword is essentially fruitless.

Also, you don’t necessarily need to be in the top three slots to be successful. In fact, if you rank well on subsequent pages, you may still have a high clickthrough rate, albeit less traffic. That’s great news for marketers who can’t seem to bring pages into those top slots or off the second page.

We said it before and we’ll say it again: The amount of traffic to your page is less important than how qualified that traffic is.

How Much Does SEO Cost?

Looking deeper: An SEO cost can mean one of two things: the investment in your organic search strategy, or how much you pay for paid search engine marketing (SEM) services like Google AdWords. If you’re paying for a tool, consultant, or marketing agency to help you optimize your web content, your bill can vary wildly with the depth of the services you’re receiving.

What Is Paid Search Engine Marketing?

Paid search engine marketing refers to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This enables you to pay a search engine for text ads shown at the top and bottom of search engine results pages after someone conducts a search. It is used to increase website traffic and gain more customers.

Looking deeper: You can actually pay for top rankings on Google SERPs by registering for a free account on Google AdWords. You’ll then select various keywords you’d like to rank under, and pay Google each time a user clicks on your result. This is called PPC search engine marketing, and your ads will be noticeably different in their appearance than the organic results below them.

How to Do SEO

Originally published Apr 1, 2021 7:00:00 AM, updated March 17 2022

What is SEO and how does it work?

by Digital Marketing Institute

Are you at the start of your SEO journey? Maybe you’ve heard that SEO can help drive traffic to your website and get you higher rankings, but you aren’t really sure how it works or what areas to focus on? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to find out what every digital marketer should know about SEO.

Defining Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Let’s start by asking an obvious question: what exactly is SEO? Well, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’, which is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results in search engines. It aims to improve your website’s position in search results pages. Remember, the higher the website is listed, the more people will see it.

These days, SEO is considered an essential marketing activity.

Differences between paid and organic search

From the outset, it’s important that you understand the differences between the organic, natural search synonymous with SEO and paid search. There are five key differences:

Position

The first difference is that paid search results appear at the top of search engine results pages, and organic results appear beneath them.

Time

Payment

When it comes to paying, well, as the name suggests, with paid search traffic is paid. You pay-per-click (PPC) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. What that means is, you pay a fee every time a user clicks on your ad. So instead of relying on organic traffic to your website, you buy traffic for your page by paying Google to show your ad when your visitor does a search for your keyword. For organic search, traffic is free, although it does require an investment of both resources and time.

ROI

In terms of the return on investment or ROI, it’s actually much easier to measure with paid search. That’s partly because Google provides more keyword data that you can capture in Google Analytics. However, with paid search, ROI can stagnate or decline over time. With organic search, ROI is a little bit harder to measure, but it often improves over time. Over the long term, organic search can offer a very good return on investment.

Share of traffic

When it comes to the share of traffic, roughly 20% to 30% of searchers click on paid results, and 70% to 80% of searchers click on SEO results. So the lion’s share of clicks are actually on the organic results.

Similarities between paid and organic search

It’s not all about differences – there are also similarities between paid and organic search:

The three pillars of SEO

As a digital marketer, knowing how to get your brand, website, or company found by searchers is a core skill, and understanding how SEO is evolving will keep you at the top of your game. While SEO changes frequently in small ways, its key principles do not. We can break SEO into three core components or pillars that you need to be familiar with – and action regularly:

How do search engines actually work?

Search engines are used by people when they have a query and are searching on the internet for the answer. Search engine algorithms are computer programmes that look for clues to give searchers the exact results they are looking for. Search engines rely on algorithms to find web pages and decide which ones to rank for any given keyword. There are three steps to how search engines work: crawling, which is the discovery stage; indexing, which is the filing stage; and ranking, which is the retrieval stage.

Step 1: Crawling

The first step is crawling. Search engines send out web crawlers to find new pages and record information about them. We sometimes call these web crawlers ‘spiders’ or ‘robots’. Their purpose is to discover new web pages that exist, and also to periodically check the content on pages they’ve previously visited to see whether they’ve changed or been updated.

Search engines crawl web pages by following links they’ve already discovered. So if you have a blog post and it’s linked from your homepage, when a search engine crawls your homepage, it will then look for another link to follow and may follow the link to your new blog post.

Step 2: Indexing

The second step is indexing. Indexing is when a search engine decides whether or not it is going to use the content that it has crawled. If a crawled web page is deemed worthy by a search engine, it will be added to its index. This index is used at the final ranking stage. When a web page or piece of content is indexed, it is filed and stored in a database where it can later be retrieved. Most web pages that offer unique and valuable content are placed into the index. A web page might not be placed in the index if:

Step 3: Ranking

The third step is really the most important step, and that is ranking. Ranking can only happen after the crawling and indexing steps are complete. So once a search engine has crawled and indexed your site, your site can be ranked.

There are more than 200 ranking signals that search engines use to sort and rank content, and they all fit under the three pillars of SEO: technical optimization, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. Some examples of signals that search engines use to rank web pages are:

Ordering and ranking results

Google’s main search algorithm is called Google Hummingbird, and it is responsible for deciding how to order and rank search engine results.

Google also has a machine-learning search engine sub-algorithm called RankBrain:

Getting the most out of RankBrain

A good SEO strategy is to optimize your website to improve user experience and satisfaction, and try to get the most out of the RankBrain ranking factor.

The three most effective ways to do this are:

Remember, Google’s top three ranking factors are:

Setting SEO objectives

Setting SEO objectives is a vital part of any SEO strategy. It is important to set SEO objectives – and to align them with your overall business objectives – because:

What should you measure?

While it can feel like a laborious task to set objectives, measuring them can really help you make progress with your SEO in the long term. So what types of things should you measure?

Examples of SEO objectives

Here are three examples of SEO objectives that can be used as a guide to setting relevant objectives for your own business or website:

«Move 50% of our top 20 keywords onto the first page of Google within nine months.» This objective focuses on keyword ranking.

«Improve our year-on-year organic traffic by 20% in quarter three and 25% in quarter four.» This objective focuses on increasing organic website traffic.

«Grow our SEO market share from 3% to 5% in the next financial year.» This objective focuses on growing market share.

Setting objectives for different types of businesses

The focus of your objectives will vary depending on whether your business is transactional or informational.

If your business is transactional and you have an e-commerce element, you’ll want to set your objectives around tracking sales and lead conversions. However, if you’re a non-ecommerce commercial site, you’ll want to focus on lead generations.

If your business is informational, you are more likely to set objectives focusing on brand awareness or website traffic.

Finally, remember, even when you have fully implemented your SEO strategy, SEO is never finished. With SEO, you may need to change tactics midway through, play a long game, and wait to see the end results. But with a solid SEO foundation in place – and a little patience – the benefits of your SEO strategy should become apparent, leading to a better user experience for customers and more conversions for your business.

How does SEO work?

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there is a wide range of strategies required to ultimately improve a website’s relevance in the eyes of search engines. Keyword-based content writing, on-page and off-page optimization, and backlink building are all essential, but understanding how SEO works can help business owners enhance their website’s visibility across all search engines, and bring in more organic traffic.

In addition to helpful information and tips on SEO, StatCounter gives its members all the necessary tools to track the effects of SEO on any given website. We also strive to provide any resources necessary so our members can thrive on competitive search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This guide intends to define the fundamentals of SEO, as well as some of its basic methodology.

Suggested Reading

How SEO Works: The Fundamental Strategies

While SEO is a complex process in which strategies will change often, especially depending on the industry, there are a few fundamental pieces of SEO that can work for nearly every website, such as title tag, meta description, heading tag, and image alt text optimization. Some other common SEO strategies, both good and bad, are as follows:

Local SEO: Local SEO is especially effective for smaller, local businesses who thrive on local search result rankings. Local SEO disregards national or global rankings, and instead aims to compete for local keywords and search engine placements for a given city or region. While it’s intuitive for local businesses to pursue local SEO, national and global businesses can also benefit from localized SEO strategies—if done correctly, that is.

White Hat SEO: White hat SEO is the type of optimization designed to benefit users, rather than solely cater to improving search engine rankings. White hat SEO practices, however, are able to align with search engines as they strive to enhance user experience. This can be done in a variety of ways, including the creation of quality content and legitimate backlinking. In any case, white hat SEO should be the preferred method, especially when compared to black hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO: Speaking of which, black hat SEO is an outdated practice that sought to exploit search engines by giving a website inauthentic authority. As search engines continue to evolve their processes, black hat SEO has been rendered ineffective compared to more authentic, quality SEO practices designed to satisfy a user’s intent. Black hat SEO still exists, but it’s not recommended, as there are myriad associated penalties that can end up being counterproductive and even hurt your website’s presence in search engine results pages.

Some strategies, however, will not work for certain businesses. For example, an e-commerce website will need a drastically different strategy to a brick and mortar storefront business. E-commerce SEO strategy will be geared toward driving as many visitors to their site to get them to purchase a product. Brick and mortar businesses, on the other hand, will have the end goal of getting customers to their physical location.

Do-it-Yourself Or Hire an SEO Company

It’s possible to do SEO all on your own, although it can be difficult especially when coupled with other business-oriented tasks. However, with enough knowledge of the multifaceted processes necessary to improve organic search rankings, there’s no need to hire an SEO company to perform these services for you. Yet, most website and business owners lack the technical knowledge of SEO necessary to improve organic rankings on their own. That’s where SEO services might come into play.

There are thousands of SEO companies today that can take the reigns and help you improve your organic search rankings. These companies range anywhere from solo SEO consultants to larger companies with dozens of writers and strategists to boost your website’s viability on search engines. Some of the best SEO companies can even provide additional services, like social media management. Of course, the costs and quality of the services provided can range widely, so it’s best to put in the research necessary to find the right company for your online presence. Or maybe it’s worth it just to take on the SEO efforts on your own!

By The Numbers

Track Your SEO Efforts with StatCounter Insights

Regardless of whether you choose to take the DIY route or hire an SEO company, you should always track your SEO efforts. With StatCounter, you can track the progress you have made on your website through our SEO training to ensure your website is competitive online.

If you have questions or comments, you can contact StatCounter support for help by filling out the form below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

Share this article

Understand your visitors with Statcounter

See why over 2,000,000 bloggers, web designers, marketing and SEO professionals and small business owners around the world use Statcounter to grow their business.

© StatCounter 1999-2022. All rights reserved.

What Is SEO and How Does SEO Work? Learn SEO in This Starter Guide

Hello there! How did you end up here? You must have been searching for how search engine optimization (SEO) works or something closely related. Whether you used Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other means to land here on this page, we’re glad you’re here to learn how SEO works.

Keep reading to learn more about how SEO optimization works — and how to optimize your site for search in this SEO starter guide. If you’re looking for a quick analysis of your SEO, enter your URL here to audit your SEO instantly and receive custom recommendations for making SEO work for you!

How is your website’s SEO?

Use our free tool to calculate your score in under 60 seconds.

What is SEO and how does SEO work?

Let’s get the formalities out of the way (and answer your question).

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a digital marketing strategy that focuses on improving your website’s position in search results on search engines like Google.

Since search engines use hundreds of factors to generate search results — Google uses more than 200 — SEO works by optimizing your site for these factors, along with getting your site crawled and indexed.

When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics, like keyword research, content creation, and page speed optimization, to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.

How does SEO work for search engines?

Search engine optimization is the product of search engines — search engine companies develop ranking factors and use those factors to determine the most relevant content for a search. However, before a search engine can determine the most relevant content, it must crawl and index it.

Once crawling and indexing happen, a search engine will analyze pages against its ranking factors, like:

Keep in mind that search engines do not publish their ranking factors.

Based on the search engine’s analysis, your content might appear in organic search results, which means you can start bringing free and relevant traffic to your site!

What is the difference between organic search and paid search?

When you submit a search to a search engine, the results display paid and organic listings — paid listings will have the word “Ad” attached to them. Click on a paid listing and the advertiser will pay for that click. Click on an organic listing and the website owner will pay nothing.

While paid search is valuable and has its uses, organic search’s return on investment (ROI) makes SEO a smart investment for any business. That’s why it’s important to learn what SEO is and how SEO works because you can use that knowledge to improve your site’s search result rankings and traffic numbers.

What are the types of search engine optimization?

You can categorize SEO tactics into three buckets:

Both on-page, off-page, and technical SEO aim to make your site more friendly, as well as trustworthy, to users and search engines. When search engine crawlers see how friendly your website is to them and users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.

What are the types of SEO strategies?

Every guide on how SEO works should explain the types of SEO strategies, which are:

If you want to make SEO work for your business long-term, invest in a white-hat SEO strategy. While black-hat SEO may deliver quick results, it will eventually result in penalties against your site, whether decreased rankings or removal from Google’s index.

Learn how SEO works with an example

When it comes to learning how SEO works, it’s often helpful to have an example.

So, say you have two websites: Website A and Website B.

Website A isn’t responsive, which means users on tablets or smartphones will have a tough time navigating and using the site. Website B, however, is responsive, which means a better user experience for tablet, smartphone, and desktop users.

For search engines, it’s an easy decision which website is more friendly: Website A.

Of course, how search engines work is a bit more complicated than that. Today, search engines use more than 200 different factors to generate search results, which means a lot of different elements influence your placement in search results.

How to make SEO work for you

Congrats! You now know how SEO works. How can you make SEO marketing work for your business, though? And by work for you, we mean help your company increase its rankings and traffic, plus its online revenue.

Well, you can start with these resources, which we’ve organized by SEO element. Check them out!

Keyword research

Keyword research is critical to how SEO works because keywords signal to search engines a page’s topic. That’s why keywords often feature in title tags, header tags, and throughout content. The key, though, is learning how to research and integrate keywords.

Learn how with these guides:

Content

How does search engine optimization work? With content! Content is a core component of SEO. If you want to use SEO to bring traffic and revenue to your site, you need to learn how to develop, create, and promote SEO content.

Here’s how to get started:

Header tags

Header tags, which include title tags, meta descriptions, and more, are another critical SEO factor. Make SEO work for your business by learning how to create SEO- and user-friendly header tags that showcase your content’s relevance and usefulness.

Check out these resources to get started:

Web design and development

SEO works with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Web design is a big component of technical SEO and requires collaboration with developers and designers. That’s why it’s important to educate yourself so you can inform designers and developers of SEO best practices.

Explore these resources to get started:

Structured data

Structured data is a fantastic way to better communicate a page’s content. Learn how to use structured data to share information about your organization, authors, page content, and more with these resources for SEO beginners:

Page speed

Create a faster website that delivers a better user experience with page speed optimizations. Learn how to make this ranking factor work for your SEO with these resources for beginner SEOs and web developers looking to improve their knowledge:

Crawling and indexing

Understand how SEO works even better with these resources on crawling and indexing, which are the basis for SEO and search engine functions.

Link building

Optimize for one of the most talked-about SEO ranking factors with these resources for link building:

Need help with your SEO, marketing manager?

Check out our SEO Guide for Marketing Managers to start driving more site traffic, leads and revenue!

Why care about how SEO works?

The Internet has really put the world at our fingertips. We are usually not more than a few clicks away from almost any information we could be looking for. When people are looking for information, services, products, and so on, they go online.

Try to remember the moment you thought, “I should really look up how search engine optimization works.”

You knew exactly what to do: You got on the Internet and you searched for “how SEO works.”

What did you do then?

Odds are you clicked on one of the first few results, at least initially. If you didn’t find a site that met your expectations, you probably clicked the back button and scrolled down the page until you found what you were looking for.

If your site isn’t properly optimized, it’s safe to assume you’re only coming up on the first page for your branded search queries — although depending on the name of your business, that might not even be the case.

That means people who don’t know you exist but are looking for someone like you will never find you, and you’ll never even have a chance to tell them why you’re better than the competition.

That’s right: Without SEO, you’re giving leads away.

The good news is you’re making it really easy on your competitors who are doing SEO. Odds are, they are loving you for not putting up a fight.

So, who cares how search engines deliver results? You definitely should!

Why do search engines care about SEO?

Why on earth does a search engine care if you use them or another search engine? After all, you’re not paying them? That’s right, you aren’t paying them…but someone else is! So the answer to this question is that they care because they make their money from advertising.

The page you are delivered to after you enter a search query is called the search engine results page (aka SERP). The SERP presents you with what are called “organic results” as well as “pay-per-click ads” (or PPC). The organic results are those that are influenced by SEO, while the PPC ads are paid for.

You cannot pay Google or any search engine to occupy any position in the organic results.

However, the ads on the page are how they make their money. So, the better the results they deliver you, the more likely you and others are use that search engine again. The more people using the search engine, the more ads they can show and the more money they can make. Make sense?

A technical explanation of how SEO works

So now you know why search engines work so hard to provide you with great results and why you should care, we can talk about how SEO works in a little more detail.

Search engines have spiders — not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind.

These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site. They collect things like page speed, title tags, social signals, internal linking, backlinks, and so on.

With over 200 ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.

The on-page factors are exactly what they sound like: Things that are actually on the page. This includes title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags, internal linking, and more. Off-page factors, meanwhile, are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites.

It’s important to keep in mind that these bots are automated computer programs and not actual humans.

As you might imagine, that means they have some limitations.

They can’t access a website like you, or I would because they don’t actually see the website: they crawl the code of the website. This means they can’t see images or videos, nor are they impressed by flashy designs or audio clips.

In fact, they can’t even comprehend content like we do!

You know how SEO works — now make it work for you!

Optimizing your website for search engines isn’t an insurmountable task by any means. If you’re a little less technically inclined, you might find it to be challenging, but you can always reach out to a web strategist for help.

WebFX is an SEO agency that has many years of experience optimizing client websites to make them more attractive to search engines. Whether you’re brand new to SEO or want to take your optimization to the next level, we’re eager and willing to help you out!

Get in touch with an SEO expert at WebFX today to discuss how we can optimize your website with a custom SEO plan. We can’t wait to hear from you!