Search Engine Optimization refers to increasing your website’s visibility in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). It simply means that if a searcher searches for something related to your website, it will be displayed first or on top by a search engine like Google or Bing. The main reason behind this is to get a good amount of traffic to the site and enhance brand awareness.

SEO functions through a series of processes that involve:

Crawling: It is the process by which the search engine browses the Internet to find and analyze web pages. The search engine bots crawl your site it will go through the semantic HTML elements to understand the content available on the web if it is relevant to the user, it provides the search result to the user. It is also equally important for the HTML to load fast if it is slow there are chances that both users and bots pass your site without noticing. The bots will crawl the article, the author’s page, and then outbound links. So, it is worth having an outbound link to sites that have content related to our sites.

Indexing: This is the process where the search engine will organize and store the gathered information in the form of a database which needs to be displayed as the search results to the end user.

Ranking: When the user performs a search through the search engine it uses a complex algorithm to determine the most relevant content and the result is displayed from top to bottom the most relevant content is displayed on the top and the least at the bottom.

The key components of the SEO are as follows:

Keyword Research: To identify the keywords relevant to the user and search accordingly.

On-Page SEO: It is about optimizing the part of our website that is controllable like the HTML Structure, Content Quality, Title, Description, and Internal linking between pages to improve navigation, URL, and images.

Off-page SEO: It is about optimizing the part of our website that is uncontrollable like the backlinks, social links, and Guest Blogging.

Technical SEO: It pertains to the back end to ensure it meets the requirements of the search engine for example fast loading speed, mobile friendliness, and secure connections.

Tools used in SEO: SEO professionals use these tools for research and analysis.

Google Analytics: It helps track website traffic and also user behaviour.

Google Search Console: It monitors the website’s performance after being displayed as search results.

SEMrush/Ahrefs: It provides competitor analysis.

Importance of SEO: SEO is the key to the success of any online businesses it helps to gain visibility through search results ending up getting potential sales. Once the ranking is higher it can sustain traffic for months with minimum efforts. It is not a one-time task as the competition is tough, as the competitors are continuously optimizing their sites by keeping their content updated, backlinks, and technical aspects essential to maintain the ranking.