Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another form of digital marketing and it plays a vital role in running a successful online business. SEO is a factor that determines how a website will rank for specific keywords and keyword phrases on the search engine result pages.
Since people are only looking at the first few results on the search engines, it is important to gain as much rankings on the first page as possible. Of all the search engines available, Google accounts for around 90% of all searches, so this is the main search engine to target.
The big question is: how do you get your website on one of the top spots on the SERP’s? The answer sounds simple, but it is not that easy. To understand SEO you must first know how Google finds your website and how it determines what the page ranking will be within its search results. When Google visits your website, it sends a Googlebot to crawl your website in and out. Crawling is the process by which Google “crawls” your website for content, images, links, structure, etc, and this is done by the “Googlebot” that Google sends out.
Three stages on the crawling process for SEO
There are three stages to how Google indexes your website and pages for SEO. This is just an overview and more information on this process can be found by doing a simple search on Google.
Crawling: Googlebot’s crawling process starts with a list of URL’s (web addresses) generated from its previous crawl and discovery. It then visits each of these URL’s in turn, detecting all the links on the page and adding them to their list of pages to crawl and discover. Any update pages, changes, or broken and dead links are updated to the index.
Indexing: After the Googlebot has crawled your website and pages, it starts to process everything it has discovered, and then compiles a list of all the words that it finds on a page. Googlebot also takes into account information found in key areas of your website. Google doesn’t process all the information that it finds, such as text on images and rich media files, flash files, etc.
Results: The order of results in Google search is determined by a complexed algorithm that takes many factors into account to determine the quality and relevancy of a page and website. Google does its best to identify spam and not include these results on when people are searching.
