The term SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website for search engines.
The first question that comes to mind after learning it is, “What is a search engine?” & what is the best way to optimize a search engine? Moreover, it might occur to you in the back of your mind as to why you need to optimize your search engine?
Right!
Let’s get started on learning more about SEO! There is a wealth of knowledge available on SEO.
Dame sure.
What is a search engine?
You already know how to use a search engine! If you have any idea?
Sounds amusing! Is that correct?
No, that isn’t amusing. You wouldn’t be able to locate us if you weren’t familiar with the search engine.
Yes, you are thinking exactly right!
Google is a search engine. Not only Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Duckduckgo. Those are search engines where you search to find any information on the web.
A search engine is a software that uses keywords or phrases to help people locate the information they’re searching for on the Internet.
By constantly searching the Internet and indexing every page they find, search engines are able to return results quickly—even with millions of websites online.
It uses unique search algorithms to find the results in its database, sort them, and create an organized list. A search engine results page is the name for this list (SERP).
If you check the web for the term “list of search engines,” you’ll find a plethora of results.
Let’s get this party started! Let’s give it a shot.
List of Top Search Engine
I figure out the list of top search engine lists with their ancient history & some features.
There’s no need for any more introductions. Google is currently in first place in the quest, with a staggering 89.43% lead over second-placed Bing.
According to Statista and StatCounter statistics, Google dominates the business across all countries and on all devices (desktop, mobile, and tablet).
Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed the engine as a research project in 1996 and offered to sell it to Excite for $750,000 in 1999. The offer was turned down, but Google is now at the top of my list of “weak business calls.” As of this writing, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is estimated at $1.012 trillion.
Aside from offering its own search results, Google also offers search results for a number of other engines, including the old standby Ask.com.
Microsoft Bing
In October 2020, Bing was changed to Microsoft Bing.
Microsoft Bing is the best Google alternative search engine. Bing’s search engine market share ranges from 2.83 percent to 12.31 percent.
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Google in search, but despite their best efforts, they have yet to persuade users that their search engine is as trustworthy as Google’s.
Despite the fact that Bing is the default search engine on Windows PCs, their search engine market share is consistently poor.
Bing is the #30 most visited website on the Internet, according to Alexa. It is derived from Microsoft’s previous search engines (MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search).
Yahoo
Yahoo is one of the most popular email providers, and its web search engine ranks third with a market share of 1%.
Yahoo search was exclusively operated by Bing from October 2011 to October 2015. Yahoo and Google signed a deal in October 2015 to provide search-related services, and Yahoo’s results were powered by both Google and Bing until October 2018.
Bing is now the sole provider of Yahoo! Search as of October 2019.
In the United States, Yahoo is also Firefox’s default search engine (since 2014).
Yahoo’s web portal is extremely popular, ranking as the Internet’s eleventh most visited website (According to Alexa).
Baidu
Baidu has a market share of 0.68 percent to 11.26 percent worldwide.
Baidu is China’s most popular search engine, having been created in 2000. According to Wikipedia, Baidu serves billions of search queries each month, and its market share is steadily growing. In the Alexa Rankings, it is currently ranked number four.
While Baidu is accessible from anywhere in the world, it is only available in Chinese.
Yandex
The most popular search engine in Russia, Yandex, has a global market share of between 0.5 and 1.16 percent.
Yandex.ru is one of the top 30 most popular websites on the Internet, according to Alexa, with a Russian rating of 4.
Yandex presents itself as a technology company that produces machine-learning-powered intelligent products and services.
According to Wikipedia, Yandex is Russia’s most popular search engine, with a market share of around 65 percent.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo has a 0.45 percent search engine market share.
According to DuckDuckGo’s traffic statistics, they serve 47 million searches a day on average, but their total market share remains below 0.5 percent.
Unlike Google and Bing, DuckDuckGo does not have its own search index and instead gets its results from a number of sources.
To put it another way, they don’t have their own data and rely on third-party sources (such as Yelp, Bing, Yahoo, and StackOverflow) to address users’ questions.
This is a major drawback as opposed to Google, which uses a series of algorithms to evaluate the best results from all of the websites on the Internet.
On the plus side, DuckDuck Go has a simple interface, does not monitor users, and is not overburdened with advertising.
Ask.com
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, has a 0.42 percent share of the search market. ASK is built on a question-and-answer format, with the majority of questions being answered by other users or being surveys.
It even has a general search feature, but the results aren’t as good as Google’s or even Bing’s or Yahoo’s.
Ecosia
Christian Kroll founded Ecosia, a Berlin-based social enterprise, in 2009. The primary goal of ecosia was to assist in the funding of tree-planting and conservation programs. As a result, it’s dubbed the “tree planting search engine.”
What is ecosia and how does it work? Ecosia is a Bing affiliate, which means that Bing powers the search results. Ecosia makes money by showing advertising in their search results, which helps to finance tree planning. Ecosia receives a small commission every time an ad is clicked. It is estimated that 45 searches are needed to fund the planting of a single tree.
Ecosia has a market share of about 0.10 percent in terms of search engines.
Aol.com
With a market share of less than 0.05 percent, the once-famous AOL is still among the top ten search engines.
Many popular websites, such as engadget.com, techchrunch.com, and huffingtonpost.com, are part of the AOL network. Verizon Communications purchased AOL on June 23, 2015.
Internet Archive
The internet archive search engine is archive.org. It can be used to see how a website has improved since 1996. If you want to follow the past of a domain and see how it has evolved over time, it’s a great tool to use.
How does Search Engine work?
Search engines are automated response systems. They exist to find, understand, and organize content on the internet in order to provide the most important answers to searchers’ questions.
Search Engine follows three steps to deliver the best output:
- Crawling: Searching the Internet for information and examining the code/content for each URL they come across.
- Indexing: It is the method of storing and organizing the content discovered during the crawling process. Once a page has been added to the database, it will be considered for display as a result of valid queries.
- Ranking: Provide the content that best answers a searcher’s question, which ensures that results are sorted from most relevant to least relevant.
What is SEO?
In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization means optimizing your website properly according to the search engine guidelines for the better performance of your site on the web.
The word “search engine optimization” refers to the method of optimizing a website for search engines. It’s the practice of using non-paid (also known as “organic”) search engine results to increase the frequency and quantity of website traffic as well as brand visibility.
The higher your pages’ exposure in search results, the more likely you are to gain attention and attract new and existing customers to your business. The main advantage of ranking for a particular keyword is that you can get “free” traffic to your site on a monthly basis.
Despite the term, SEO is about people just as much as it is about search engines. It’s all about figuring out what people are looking for on the internet, what responses they’re looking for, what words they’re using, and what kind of content they want to receive. Realizing the facts of the matter will help you interact with users who are searching for the solutions you have on the internet.
If understanding the audience’s meaning is one side of the SEO coin, the other is presenting it in a way that search engine crawlers can find and understand.
How SEO works?
The aim of search engines is to provide the best possible service to their users.
This entails providing search engine results that are not only of high quality, but also important to the searcher’s needs.
To do this, search engines can check or crawl, various websites in order to better understand what they are about.
Search engines have spiders — the automated robot kind, not the scary kind.
These spiders gather a variety of data about your website and the pages that make it up. This enables them to quickly decide when a searcher should be served a page from your site. Page speed, title tags, social signals, internal linking, backlinks, and other factors are gathered.
This enables them to offer more accurate results to people looking for particular topics or keywords.
Similarly, search engines will check the web to see how easy it is to access and learn, with user-friendly sites receiving higher SERP rankings.
SEO is the mechanism by which companies ensure that their websites rank highly in search engines for specific keywords and phrases.
Let’s pretend you’ve written an article on “What is WordPress”.
You will most likely do this in order to get the material in front of the right people.
You’ll try to customize this blog post so that it appears as the first result when anyone searches for “What is WordPress.”
There are numerous advantages to using SEO for your business.
You can work to increase your popularity on search engines by enhancing your SEO. This allows you to reach out to and communicate with a larger number of potential customers.
You will improve your chances of getting in more targeted organic traffic by producing more engaging and effective SEO-focused content.
Why Is SEO So Important?
SEO marketing is more crucial than ever in today’s dynamic market.
Every day, millions of people use search engines to find answers to their questions or solutions to their problems.
SEO will help you get free targeted traffic from search engines if you have a website, blog, or online store.
SEO is important for the following factors:
- The majority of search engine users will click on one of the top five recommendations in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this and draw visitors to your website or customers to your online store, your website must rank among the top results.
- SEO is for more than just search engines; it also improves a website’s accessibility and user experience.
- Users trust search engines, and getting a website that appears in the top results for the keywords the user is looking for improves the website’s trust.
- SEO is helpful to the website’s social promotion. People who discover your website through a Google or Bing search are more likely to post it on Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking sites.
- The smooth operation of a broad website necessitates the use of SEO. SEO can support websites with multiple writers in both direct and indirect ways. Their direct gain is more organic traffic, and their indirect benefit is providing a standard structure to follow before posting content on the web.
- SEO will help you get a leg up on the competition. If two websites offer the same product, the one that is optimized for search engines is more likely to attract more visitors and generate more sales.
Factors That Affect your Site Ranking
You also have a thorough understanding of “What is a Search Engine” and “How Search Engines Operate,” as well as “What is SEO” and “How SEO Works.”
Now you must consider about “how you rank your site” or “how you get organic traffic”.
Let’s look at some of the things that can influence your search engine optimization score.
Some of the factors that influence search engine results page (SERP) rankings are fairly well understood.
These considerations include both on-page and off-page elements, which we’ll go through in more detail below.
- Content Marketing
- Technical SEO
- On-page Optimization
- Off-page Optimization
Content Marketing
Content is successful in attracting search engines as well as assisting your site in building relationships with users.
High Quality Content
The more important and high-quality content you have on your blog, the more likely search engines would rank your pages higher in search engine results.
Likewise, the more entertaining and effective content you have on your site, the more likely it is that your visitors will stay for a while.
Proper Keywords & Phrases
When creating content for your website, SEO keywords and phrases are crucial to remember.
These are terms and phrases that a user could type into a search engine when searching for answers to their questions or related products and services.
You increase the chances of ranking higher for these keywords on the search engine results page by creating content around them.
Freshness of Content
Another aspect that can influence your content and, as a result, your search engine ranking is how new it is.
Freshness refers to how often the company updates its website with new material.
Creating brand new material, on the other hand, isn’t the only way to keep the content fresh.
You can also keep your content fresh by updating it, rewriting it to make it more effective, or gradually adding new data and statistics.
Technical SEO
The method of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing is known as technical SEO. With technological SEO, you can ensure that search engines can easily access, crawl, translate, and index your website.
It’s referred to as “technical” because it has nothing to do with the website’s actual content or promotion. The primary aim of technical SEO is to improve a website’s infrastructure.
A technical SEO audit of your website is always a good idea, and this is your technical SEO checklist.
- Choose a suitable domain.
- Check and improve your robots.txt file.
- Examine and improve the structure of your URLs.
- Review the website’s navigation and structure.
- Breadcrumb menus can be added to your articles and websites.
- Breadcrumbs should be marked up with schema markup.
- Make your homepage more structured by including structured data.
- Make your posts more organized by using structured data.
- Other sites may have structured data added to them (based on their type)
- Make sure your canonical URLs are correct.
- Remove all the 404 page.
- Optimize your XML sitemap and upload it to Google and Bing.
- Activate HTTPS
- Check your website’s loading speed and try to make it quicker.
- Examine the website’s mobile friendliness.
- Consider using AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages) (AMP)
- Make sure your pagination and multilingual settings are right.
- Google Search Console is a free service that allows you to register your website.
- Bing Webmaster Tools allows you to register your website.
You can conduct a general SEO audit to verify the degree of optimization on your website, which involves a lot more tests that go beyond technical SEO.
On-page optimization
The elements that occur on your website are referred to as on-page SEO factors. The elements on your own website are all considered on-page influences. These considerations include your site’s technical setup, code quality, textual and visual content, and user-friendliness.
On-page SEO is the method of optimizing individual content pages to improve search rankings and drive targeted traffic. It provides strategies for improving a single page’s ranking for a primary keyword.
On-page SEO attracts search engines and helps them understand, identify, and rate your content, so use it to help blog posts and pages gain search visibility. We developed an on-page SEO checklist to assist you in this process. You’ll never miss a chance to improve your web pages or blog posts this way.
Here are a few on-page SEO considerations that can help you rank higher in organic search results.
- Choose the best performing keywords
- Choose a focus keywords for your content
- Find some related keywords for the content
- Make a title with the focus keyword in it
- An H1 tag should be used to wrap the title.
- Optimize the content for better readability
- Keywords density should be 2-3%
- H2 tags should be used to wrap subheadings.
- Use focus keywords in the first & last paragraph of the content
- Use targeted anchor text to add related internal links.
- Add related outbound links to the high authority site
- Interlink & outbound link should be open in a new tab
- Add one featured image & other related images
- To the image file name, add the focus keyword
- In the image title, include the focus keyword
- In the image alt tag, add the focus keyword
- The picture should be appropriately sized
- Create a URL that is SEO-friendly and contains the target keywords.
- Assign tags and categories that are appropriate.
- Include an optimized meta title
- Add the optimized meta description with the target keyword
- The meta description should be 157-160 character long max
- Add markup for structured data.
- social sharing button should be included
- Make sure the content is error-free.
- Use LSI Keywords for better rank
- Remove all broken links
- Optimize open graph properly
Off-page Optimization
Any attempts made outside of a website to boost its search engine rankings are referred to as off-page SEO.
While link building is commonly thought to be the most important off-page SEO tactic, there are many more off-page SEO tactics to employ if you want to gain a competitive advantage.
Branding, citation creation, content marketing, social networking, and other SEO tactics all play a role in a systematic SEO strategy.
Off-page SEO, in a nutshell, refers to any SEO strategies that don’t include making improvements to your own website or posting material on your own platform.
These signals are used as main confidence and relevance indicators by both search engines and users to determine the authority of your site.
These 13 off-page SEO practices, in our experience, are the easiest to implement and yield the best results.
- Creating Connections
- Marketing on Social Media
- Mentions of the Brand
- Customer Feedback
- Outreach to Influencers
- Guest Post
- Building Broken Link
- Local Search Engine Optimization
- Forums
- Making a comment
- Bookmarking on social media
- Answers to the questions
- Podcasts
Creating Connections
The most popular and effective off-page SEO technique is link building. Basically, you’re trying to get as many “votes” as possible by creating links to your website so that you can outrank your rivals and number higher.
If anyone likes this article and links to it from his or her website or blog, this is the equivalent of telling search engines that this page contains useful information.
Marketing on Social Media
People now spend more time on social networking sites than they did even a few years ago, according to analysis. Engaging and leveraging your social network to expand the scope of your content is a successful off-page SEO strategy.
When a piece of content receives clicks from several IP addresses, it becomes more authoritative to Google because it indicates that the content is being accessed by people from all over the world.
If you have high-quality content that includes real-world data, it can be spread across networks, exposing the content to a larger audience.
Mentions of the Brand
According to Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, if you have good content, a few backlinks, people talking about your brand, and mentions on social media networks, you are doing well.
Search engines may use social mentions to determine whether or not people are talking about you. Engage with social media audiences to increase brand mentions, and work to provide useful answers wherever possible to establish authority and trust.
Customer Feedback
Customer reviews, whether they be for your business, website, services, or products, all play a part in your rankings. The most powerful off-page SEO technique is feedback.
The majority of reviews will be marked as “nofollow,” but if they come from reputable sources (such as Google My Company, Yelp, or TrustPilot), they can help boost your local rankings. These reviews are trusted by Google, and they are used as a ranking signal.
So, if you sell goods or services, make sure you claim your business profile on all major review platforms and ask your customers to leave feedback.
Using feedback in your off-page SEO strategy will help you gain more visibility on search engines and increase user confidence.
Outreach to Influencers
Add a community-driven section to your post and reaching out to popular influencers in your field, asking for input, a quote, or a review in exchange for their valuable insight. Give their quotes some meaning and emphasize them in some way.
Once the content is live, make sure to share it with their friends and family. People are curious about the opinions of influential people.
As a result, you can cultivate relationships with influencers and use their power to boost your own.
Guest Post
When done correctly, guest blogging will add much more value to your marketing campaign than simply building links — it’s all about writing as a guest for someone else’s website and offering value and content to their audience.
However, there’s no denying that it’s still one of the most common link-building strategies, and it’s also the most successful.
There are some blogs that are accepting guest posts. You simply need to define the keyword you’re looking for and then conduct a Google search as follows:
- “Write for us” + keyword
- “Become a contributor” + keyword
- “Contribute” + keyword
- “Guest blogging” + keyword
Guest posting, when done correctly, will help you get your brand in front of a targeted audience, send targeted traffic, and position yourself as an expert in your field.
And, in fact, links should not be the sole reason for guest posting; they should only be a bonus if they occur.
Guest posting can be used to reach a new audience, get in front of the traffic of a similar site, and create your brand. When you approach the strategy with this attitude, you’ll find it to be extremely beneficial.
Building Broken Link
Building broken links is an intriguing tactic. The aim is to locate broken ties and contact the resource’s owner. It could be a broken link on one of your own sites, which you would then update, or an obsolete competitor’s link, which you would then offer to substitute with one of your links to similar material. As a result, the number of redirects and 404 pages would be reduced, resulting in a better user experience.
When web hosting expires or site assets are messed up during migration, broken links are common. They may also be the product of typing errors. Often go with a reputable web hosting company and proofread to prevent spelling mistakes.
Local Search Engine Optimization
Although local SEO is a complete SEO discipline in and of itself, there are a few elements that are important off-page SEO tactics, the most important of which are Google My Business and citations.
Google My Business is a service provided by Google
Google My Business is an important part of almost every local business’s online presence, and it’s easy to overlook the fact that optimizing your page and having it to rank in the map pack is actually off-page SEO.
GMB isn’t your own website, and don’t forget that any efforts that aren’t focused on your own platform are considered off-page.
According to recent reports, 46% of all Google searches are for local information, and 4 out of 5 people use search engines to find local information. It’s a simple fact that if your company isn’t included in the local GMB results, one of your rivals is.
Citations
A citation is an online mention of your online business that usually includes not only your company name but also your NAP (name, address, and phone number). Consider them to be company directories.
Given that citations are considered to be one of the key off-page ranking considerations if you are a local business looking to rank for geographically focused search terms both on the regular SERPs and as part of the map bundle, you absolutely cannot ignore the value of citations.
However, accuracy is one of the keys to citation performance.
Inconsistent citations show a lack of coherence, so take the time to double-check that all of your NAP references match up.
Forums
Find and engage in forum discussions about your product or service that are relevant to your services or products. Build a relationship with that group, respond to threads, help others with their problems, and offer your advice and suggestions because Google loves debates!
Be sure to complete your profile and include an anchor in your signature so that your signature appears alongside your anchor whenever you comment. Look for forums that have do-follow connections.
Making a comment
Getting more backlinks used to be as easy as leaving a comment on another blog with a connection back to your own. That is, until the tactic was exploited, and Google decided that irrelevant comment backlinks were no longer useful.
You may believe that blog commenting is no longer relevant, but there are several reasons to continue commenting on blogs, as long as you do so correctly and with the appropriate audience. It will assist you in developing a rapport with the blog owner and other commenters.
Bookmarking on social media
One of the most effective ways to get users quickly is by social bookmarking. However, there is a long debate over whether or not to use it. Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, and Reddit. If you’re going to use it, make sure to write a catchy tagline with relevant content to give your article a boost.
Answers to the questions
Writing great content and distributing it to the right people can be one of the most effective ways to establish your authority on sites like Stack Overflow, Quora, and Yahoo Answers. Choose a forum with a high level of authority and relevance, scan for your niche and related questions, and respond in a way that adds value to the issue.
If you’ve written a guide on the same topic, provide a link to your website so visitors can easily find it. Take care with the connections, so they don’t appear to be spam. This technique, if executed correctly, has the potential to be a game-changer in terms of off-page SEO.
Podcasts
Podcasts are very common right now, and their popularity is growing by the month. In reality, 44% of Americans have listened to a podcast at least once in their lives, with 73 million listening on a monthly basis.
They are important, and if you do not include them in your marketing plan, you might be losing out on significant opportunities. Keep in mind that podcasting is a labor of love.
Podcasts are a low-cost way to communicate with your viewers. Plan your newsletter, including newly published content from your blog as well as some exclusive, newsletter-only content. In general, keep your newsletters short but packed with useful and interesting material. They should also be simple to consume.
Let’s take a look at the advantages:
- Most companies are also not using podcasts as part of their marketing plan, which means it’s a perfect way to gain a competitive edge.
- They’re a great way to connect with new people, share your knowledge, and gain exposure on search engines other than Google.
- Another choice is Google Podcasts, as well as Listen Notes.
- Apple’s Podcasts is also a search engine, allowing you to use keywords to find relevant podcasts.
Conclusion
I hope that this guide has provided you with a clearer understanding of “What is SEO” and “How SEO Works.” All listed above should serve as a fairly comprehensive overview of SEO fundamentals.
I wanted to go beyond a basic description of search engine optimization in this guide. And I’ll show you how to get started with a few concrete steps.
There’s a lot to learn about SEO, as you can see. However, given the amount of targeted traffic SEO may generate, it may be well worth the time and effort.
As a result, I suggest starting with the fundamentals: ensure that search engines can completely crawl your web. Then start writing content that is keyword-optimized. Finally, outreach is a good way to get backlinks.
