What Is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of applying a range of techniques to raise a website’s ranking in the search results of a Search Engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.
There are millions of people applying billions of questions and topics to search engines every day, and every search brings up thousands to millions of web pages. If these were ranked in a purely logical fashion, A-Z, chronologically or by size, it may take several hours for a user to find what they’re actually looking for. The most accurate solution to this problem would be to have a human curator sifting through and finding the most relevant answers and directions for any given search, but the sheer volume of web pages that exist makes this virtually impossible, and since more pages are added every day, the whole process would have to be repeated often.
Enter: The Search Engine Algorithm
The creators of Google predicted this problem while they were working on their search engine in 1996, and from day one they incorporated their own algorithm designed to calculate the relevance of a web page to a web search based initially on popularity and the number of links to and from other pages. Ever since then, as the internet as a whole has expanded and so have the number of users, every search engine has incorporated an algorithm to manage their search results, and they have been growing in complexity continuously.
SEO is all about fulfilling the criteria of these algorithms, and since the theoretical design philosophy of each algorithm is about guiding users to the content which best matches their searches, good SEO also involves the generation of high quality, relevant content.
The inner workings of each algorithm are closely guarded secrets of their respective owners, as SEO experts, we approximate which techniques work best through constant experimentation. The challenge is in keeping ahead of the curve so that websites don’t harshly fall in the rankings, or if they do, figuring out what the problem is, and how to recover. The best way to avoid being blind-sided by an algorithmic change is to always keep in mind the stated goal of the ones designing the algorithms; a better user experience.