Many web designers and developers might think that they don’t need to learn SEO and would much rather push it aside to let the marketing team handle, after all, it is more of a marketing factor anyway. Think again! Understanding SEO, knowing how to implement it and how it affects a website can be highly beneficial knowledge, especially if you are a designer or developer. The SEO Academy is here to help.
Why Learn SEO?
Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is the group of techniques used to ensure that your website ranks as high a possible on a results page of a search engine. Simply, it is a way to get unpaid, organic traffic to your website.
With more than 12 billion searches occurring on Google every single month, it is highly important that your site is correctly optimized for SEO to ensure it gets seen not only by your target audience but by Google first. If your site is not SEO optimized, it’s safe to say that you’re turning away thousands of seeing eyes from your site.
Search Engines: How do they work?
It’s important to understand how search engines work to get your site ranking on one. When a query (or search term) is entered into a search engine, the engine then searches through all of the indexed sites it has in its indexed database to find the ones that are best suited to the query.
This is based on three deciding factors: relevance, authority, and technical ability. After that, it then ranks all sites in its database accordingly to present a list of websites that fit best with your search query.
Indexing of Websites
For this process to take place, the search engine needs to have a database of indexed websites. An indexed website is one that the search engine had scanned through to determine what information is available there.
Indexing is done by bots (or crawlers) which is just a fancy name for really complicated software scripts. These scripts follow links across the web going from website to website indexing all the information they can find. If a page has not been indexed, it will not appear in any search results.
Big search engines are constantly indexing. It’s almost guaranteed that any existing websites online have been indexed.
What it Takes to Rank Well
As mentioned, the three ranking factors that matter most to get your page ranking well include relevance, technology, and authority. And so, in other words:
- What is your website about?
- How many inbound links does your site have; and
- What does the structure (sitemaps and meta information) of your site look like?
The search engine uses this information to determine if it fits with a search query and ranks it as such.
While adding relevant keywords and information to appeal to the search engines, consider your audience first. Write your content for them first, and then optimize for SEO. Learn SEO and you’ll get the best of both worlds, impressing both humans and bots.
