Search engine optimization or SEO in short, is a set of rules for optimizing you website for search engines and improve your search engine rankings.
In addition, it is a great way to increase the quality of your web site by making it user- friendly, faster and easier to navigate. SEO can also be considered as a framework since the whole process has a number of rules (or guidelines), a number of stages and a set of controls. Almost an even mix, actually. Of course, there were also some outliers that we’ll look at towards the end of this post.
How it works?
Google (and Bing, which also power Yahoo search results) score their search results largely based upon relevancy and authority of pages it has crawled and included in its web index, to a users query to provide the best answer.
Google uses over 200 signals in scoring their search results and SEO encompasses technical and creative activities to influence and improve some of those known signals. It’s often useful to not focus too much on individual ranking signals and look at the wider goal of Google, to provide the best answers for its users.
SEO, therefore, involves making sure a website is accessible, technically sound, uses words that people type into the search engines, and provides an excellent user experience, with useful and high quality, expert content that helps answers the user’s query.
Google has a very large team of search quality raters that evaluate the quality of search results, that gets fed into a machine learning algorithm. Google’s search quality rater guidelines provide plenty of detail and examples of what Google class as high or low quality content and websites, and their emphasis on wanting to reward sites that clearly show their expertise, authority and trust (EAT).
