A brief introduction to SEO
But wait! what are search engines you may ask.
Search engines are tools that help users to locate whatever they are seeking for on the web. Think of it. Imagine trying to search for a specific grain of sand on the beach. You will waste lots of time doing this because the particles are not organized in a coherent way. In the same way, there are millions of websites and billions of images. Prior to search engines, these were not organized in any specific way.
Each website has a unique location on another computer called a server. The location of the website on the hosting computer is called the url or uniform resource locator. Prior to search engines, you would have had to write down the url of any site that was useful to you because you would need to type the name correctly, each time you want to visit the site.
Since sites are in the millions, you are required to know the exact url of any site you want to visit. This would have been a horrible situation if not for search engines. Search engines came to organize the internet just like a librarian organizes a book store. They did this by building their own indexes where they arranged all the info on the web.
In a library, books are arranged by topic and within topics, they are sometimes arranged alphabetically. This means there is a history section, a politics section etc. These library sections are the same as indexes in search engines. So if as an author, you want your book to get found, you cannot afford to have a nameless book in the library cause it cannot be indexed. The same applies with search engines. So this is what SEO is about. It is about knowing what search engines need to crawl, index and display your page in search results, and then getting on with the job of ensuring that those requirements are met
So if a searcher types 'cat pictures', the search engine uses the words as keys to unlock corresponding content in its index. which in this case would be cat images. The issue lies in the fact that there are many sites with beautiful cat images. So which site does the search engine favor?
This is where SEO comes in. By understanding the theory of search engine algorithms, you can improve the ranking of your site or online resources
Back to the question; which site does the search engine favor?
The engines make these decisions based on a list of ranking criteria. These ranking factors are assessed on three levels which are:
On page level
Off page level and
Technical level
Let's use book example to understand this better. Let's assume that your brain is an engine that you use to assess the value of a book. You can judge the book based on the binding and how professional the cover looks (technical level). In the same way, search engines judge sites by their technical appearance (code quality, page hierarchy, site speed...)
You can also assess the book based on what other people think of it or number of people who are talking about it (off page). Search engines do this by measuring the social signals from a site. They measure the number of likes the site is getting on Facebook, the number of Twitter followers, the frequency of social media activity by the site and it's social handles etc. They also measure the number of backlinks to the site across the internet. All these constitute the off page ranking criteria.
Lastly, you can assess the book by quick taking aa quick look through. You can also assess the quality of the book based on the way its chapters are organized, the name of the author, the text and grammar (on page). Search engines do this by assessing the keyword coverage and topical relevance of pages. They assess the volume and originality of content too. So when you search for cat pictures, it is the sites with the highest score on each of these levels that will be favored by the search engine.
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