Sedulity Groups | Search engine optimization (SEO) – Best way to improve your website ranking

SEO is the process of improving the visibility (ranking) of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" search results. In general, A website will receive more visitors if it appears earlier and more frequently in the search results list.

Have you ever wondered why some of the websites rank better than the others? It is because of a powerful web marketing technique Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords.

According to Mr. Mukul Girdhar, VP Sedulity Groups, “For effective SEO, one should create backlinks, or inbound links, as it automatically helps to improve website ranking.”

The effectiveness of SEO can be determined by the position of a web site on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when searching for a certain keyword, or by web analytics Key Performance Indexes (KPI-s).

Whenever a keyword is entered in a search engine, a list of web results appears containing that keyword. Usually users visit the websites that are on the top of the list. SEO is a technique which helps search engines find and rank your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query.

Search engines are text-driven. They crawl the Web, looking at particular site items to get an idea what a site is about. Search engines perform several activities in order to deliver search results – crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving.

First, search engines crawl the Web. This task is performed by a crawler or a spider. Spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find on their way. Having in mind the number of pages on the Web (over 20 billion), it is impossible for a spider to visit a site daily just to see if a new page has appeared or if an existing page has been modified, sometimes crawlers may not end up visiting your site for months.

After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. The indexed page is stored in a giant database, from where it can later be retrieved. Essentially, the process of indexing is identifying the words and expressions that best describe the page and assigning the page to particular keywords. For a human it will not be possible to process such amounts of information but generally search engines deal just fine with this task. If the pages of your website are properly optimized, it will be easier for them to classify your pages correctly and for you – to get higher rankings.

When a search request comes, the search engine processes it – i.e. it compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database. Since it is likely that more than one page (practically it is millions of pages) contains the search string, the search engine starts calculating the relevancy of each of the pages in its index with the search string.

There are various algorithms to calculate relevancy. Each of these algorithms has different relative weights for common factors like keyword density, links. That is why different search engines give different search results pages for the same search string. What is more, it is a known fact that all major search engines, like Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc. periodically change their algorithms and if you want to keep at the top, you also need to adapt your pages to the latest changes.

The last step in search engines' activity is retrieving the results. Basically, it is nothing more than simply displaying them in the browser – i.e. the endless pages of search results that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites.