The Technology Behind SEO

Links, which are the technology behind SEO allow the search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers” or “spiders,” to reach the many billions of interconnected documents on the web. Once the engines find these pages, they decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engine companies have constructed datacenters all over the world.
So, big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are constantly indexing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of webpages. How do they know what to show on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when you enter a search query? The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.

1. Content on your website: When indexing pages, the search engine bots scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your website covers and scanning your website’s back-end code for certain tags, descriptions, and instructions.
2. Who’s linking to you: As the search engine bots scan webpages for indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound links a website has, the more influence or authority it has
A few factors that a search engine algorithm may consider when deciding what information to show in the SERP include:

• Geographic location of the searcher
• Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
• Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
• Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
• Back end code or HTML of webpage
• Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)

WHY THEN IS SEO NECESSARY?
An important aspect of this technology behind SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine robots to understand. Although search engines have become increasingly sophisticated, they still can’t see and understand a web page the same way a human can. SEO helps the engines figure out what each page is about, and how it may be useful for users.
Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques after those, can drastically improve your business’ ability to rank in the search engines and get found by your potential customers.