Did you know that last year, 90% of online searchers used the internet to find a local business? If you have your own business selling products or services, how well do you think your website did when a target customer created a search for your niche? Those who have invested in search engine optimization (SEO) will most likely have the reports to give a fairly accurate answer. Due to the nature of SEO analytics, a business owner can point out when business traffic grew as a result of SEO strategies and processes.

If you’re an individual that would frown upon this question, primarily because SEO still remains a mystery to you, let me tell you that you aren’t alone in this. You may know that SEO stands for “search engine optimization”, but that’s about it. You don’t know if it’s actually helpful to business growth and if spending marketing funds would be worth it.

Let’s simply outline what SEO is:

– It is a set of measures both on -page and off -page
– Designed to increase a business or organization’s online visibility
– Steps taken to achieve higher rank in search engine results

Now that we know what the basics of SEO is, let’s move on to understanding how these measures work. All search engines have an algorithm they follow (though everchanging) to decide what information to display during a searcher’s query. Google is the largest search engine, so we will focus primarily on how they categorize content and what this means for SEO and your business.

Crawling

Search engines use robots (also known as spiders) “crawl” and quickly “scan” online content. These bots quickly crawl over content like videos, text, images, webpages, etc. . . The bots scan new uploaded content or whenever aged material adds updated information. The information is recorded and stored in a large URL database. This is what generates internet search results and what business owners hope they have been graded competitively enough to be on the ranking front page.

Importance of Crawling in SEO

If bots do not crawl or scan your website, it would also not get indexed.

What does this mean exactly?

Basically, your website won’t be found in Google or any other search engine. Even if somebody was TRYING to find your page, there is zero web footprint to follow. Simply put, it is nonexistent. The little web foot soldiers couldn’t locate your web page and they had no information to send back to for saving.

To make sure your website is seen then, create a page that is bot scan friendly. On-page SEO elements will play a vital role for scanning. Hence, make sure your webpage is structured in a way for bots to crawl it. Additionally, placing updates and changes will also trigger bots to scan it again. Fresh content and changes are ranking factors and can raise search result order.

SEOReseller are experts in structuring on-page SEO, paving the way for bots to scan your page. Talk to one of our experts today!

Indexing

Once the “crawl” or “scan” has been completed, the information is organized (or indexed) in a database in terms of relevance. The search engine will also highlight where the words are located on the webpage.
In this process, the search engine actively compares the content with other similar “words” to determine how it is organized. The better the “grade” for relevance and satisfying the search engine algorithm, the more likely the page will rank well.

Importance of Indexing in SEO

While crawling is the gathering of information, the processing and putting in order is indexing. Both are important, but indexing is equivalent to how a page has been graded.

Even if a website has been crawled on, this alone isn’t enough. A website needs to be optimized so that during filing, they can get closer to the front of the line. Factors like backlinks, blogs, content, and keywords are just some samples that affect where a website is indexed amongst similar search topics.

The closer to the front of the digital index, the better chances a business can get in front of their target audience. From this, foot traffic to brick and mortar stores increase, ecommerce stores have greater sales, and service providers can attract more customers!

SEOReseller’s website optimization is beneficial in two ways:

Structuring websites so bots will crawl and scan them and
Structuring websites for high grade indexing

Ranking

The combination of crawling and indexing is part of the complex process of ranking. Now that a web page has been recorded and their information is organized in comparison to similar topics, they are ranked accordingly. When a person makes a search online, Google provides a list of answers based on the ranking.

Google and other search engines determine what the best answers are based on the retrieved web index. However, a volatile and ever changing algorithm should prevent anybody from relying on a consistent search result. Just because a business ranks high (or has the coveted number 1 spot on SERP), doesn’t mean it will stay on top. As swift as the weather changes, so will Google rank results.

Hey Google: This Content Is Relevant! (SEO Explained)

Is there a simple way to understand what SEO is? Yes . . . SEO are all items and actions used to help show the relevance of a website. Here’s a list of items that influence how “relevant” a page is:

Business location
Engagement on social media
High versus poor quality website
Online reviews

These are just a few examples of factors that play into web page relevancy. They have various ways they are ranked, and there is no one “perfect equation” to follow. With so many unique elements, a website can ebb and flow on ranking. The goal though, is to continue staying relevant. If a business finds themselves on the third or fourth page, it is highly unlikely that the correlating web page is either

Not getting SEO crawled
Sitting in the very back of a web index
Or factors affecting relevancy is being ignored

SEO Measures

Professional SEO agencies use many measures to boost their relevance (become optimized) for search engines. Unfortunately, some of the tools used are highly technical like bots and algorithms. For many people, these technical measures are too confusing and hard to understand.

The other side to SEO measures require non-technical issues like posting high-quality keyword-rich content to web pages. Online reputations are reviewed consistently and social media is watched carefully to ensure a positive online credibility.

SEO can be intimidating and often a topic many business owners stay away from. The solution to this is to hire professionals who already have a proven and solid methodology with SEO services. Therefore, if this is you, consider hiring a professional SEO team to grow your online presence. At SEOReseller, we can both start and maintain your websites for constant optimization and relevancy. We’re here to help!

 

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