What are search engines?
When we hear the term search engine, we immediately think of Google, Yahoo or any other similar website that makes it easier to find content on the Internet. But how does a search engine actually work? How does it know where all the pages are and what content they contain?
Google actually uses several Googlebots, which is a generic name for web crawlers created by Google. Such web crawlers scan the entire Internet every day, gathering notes on each website and its content. Googlebots then report the findings to Google, and the data collected is processed and added to existing data in a process called indexing.
It is important to know what data robots collect from the website. That way, it is possible to perform optimizations to improve the website's position (SEO-rating) on search engines.
Appealing to search engines
Google has put together a comprehensive SEO guide. Working through the full guide is a daunting task and hence we’ve brought out the important parts for you. They are also illustrated via this graph from Rand Fishkin.
The essentials of getting your page visible on search engines is making it available for these robots to crawl. In other words, the site must be accessible on the Internet. In addition, we have outlined some guidelines to improve your SEO rating.
Essentials:
- Make your site mobile-friendly.
- Unique and accurate page titles.
- Use headings to emphasize important text.
- Create a sitemap.
Further improvements:
- Use the description meta tags.
- Add structured data markups.
- Organize your site hierarchy.
- Avoid very long sentences.
- Advertise or promote your website (paid service).
Following these guidelines should get any site up to a pretty good SEO rating. Working through the full guide, however, will guarantee even better results. Depending on the technical solution of your website there might be libraries that can help you with the process. Wordpress has a lot of plugins to help you optimize your site for SEO.
WordPress plugins
Here at Advertis we use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize our content for search engines. Yoast SEO allows you to easily add and manage related keywords, optimize text and paragraph lengths, internal links, meta tags and many other key optimizations. The full list of features can be found here. Surely there are other plugins offering the same functionality. It is up to each reader to choose the tools to achieve the goals above.
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