SEO is a process of increase the visibility of a website to services like Google’s index crawler. To fully understand SEO we must understand the “Search” or in other terms Google search. As Google is largest search engine on the internet and we will be focusing on it during this post.
Starting at the lowest level : Google. Google is a service that provides users information based on search queries. At the very beginning Google developed a program called a “Crawler”. This crawler started off at one web page and read everything the web page contained. At first this crawler was only looking for basic information, one of the key information fields that it looked for were links. These links where important as they referenced other web pages.
This is where the crawler found its name, basically it would go from page to page finding links to other sites creating a road map of how all these websites were related. The result of this being the road map that is referenced by Google as an index, an index of all the sites on the web. Why is indexing important to Google searches? Google stores a copy of this index and is the foundation of Google search results. When a user types “What is SEO?” in to Google, Google queries it’s database full of previously crawled websites and finds any content containing any of the keywords. Without Google’s own database of websites it would take years to search the entire web for a single search query. Does that mean Google is often out of date? Yes, and no. Google’s technology has and is rapidly developing to cope with the ever expanding world wide web. Google has crawlers working 24/7 constantly updating its database and making sure users get the results they need. However crawlers can’t crawl every site at once, that is why SEO is so important because it allows these crawlers to identify and locate our web sites faster and more efficiently, resulting in delivering users with relevant and up-to date content.
Founder of Google Larry Page formulated a way to score and rank a web sites based on the websites content, this is other-wise knowas PageRank. PageRank was the foundation of Google search back in the day, and supposedly it is not a key factor in the way searchresults are displayed today. How does PageRank work? PageRank basically gets the results from the crawler and counts how many links there are referencing the web site and measures the quality of those links. Consider links as references on a job resume, the more references a candidate might have the more trust worthy & reliable the candidate might be. The same concept applies with web sites, the more links to a web site the more likely the site is to being reliable and trust worthy source of information.
Stakeholders involved with SEO are the Search Engine, websites displaying content, and most importantly the USER. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo all have a reputation to uphold in delivering users with accurate search results. Websites such as blogs, company’s, and causes all have stakes in ensuring that their content reaches relevant users. Websites use SEO techniques to make sure that users are been shown their content at the most relevant times possible. Last but not least users in this equation are most the important stakeholder as they are the reason why the previously mentioned stakeholders exist. Without curious users searching Google over 3.5 billions times a day there would be no reason to provide the content and resources that websites strive everyday to do.