{"id":7006,"date":"2023-04-16T06:56:13","date_gmt":"2023-04-16T06:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/?p=7006"},"modified":"2023-04-16T06:56:13","modified_gmt":"2023-04-16T06:56:13","slug":"how-seo-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/16\/how-seo-works\/","title":{"rendered":"How SEO Works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The search engine you used didn\u2019t randomly pick this page out of the sky and send you here hoping it would answer how search engine optimization works. In fact, it used a very complex algorithm to determine which of the millions of pages it has indexed on the subject of SEO would be most appropriate to present to you in hopes of best answering your question.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>What is SEO and how does SEO work?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on your website\u2019s presence in search results on search engines like Google. When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You can categorize SEO tactics into two buckets:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/2023\/04\/16\/seo-basics-on-site-and-off-site-seo-explained\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On-page SEO<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: All on-page SEO strategies happen on your website.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/2023\/04\/16\/off-site-seo-guide-what-you-might-be-missing-out-on\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Off-page SEO<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">: All off-page SEO strategies happen off your website.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Both on-page and off-page SEO aim to make your site more friendly, as well as trustworthy, to users and search engines. When search engine crawlers see how friendly your website is to them and users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For example, say you have two websites: Website A and Website B.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Website A isn\u2019t responsive, which means users on tablets or smartphones will have a tough time navigating and using the site. Website B, however, is responsive, which means a better user experience for tablet, smartphone, and desktop users.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For search engines, it\u2019s an easy decision which website is more friendly: Website A.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of course, how search engines work is a bit more complicated than that. Today, search engines use more than 200 different factors to generate search results, which means a lot of different elements influence your placement in search results.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Why do search engines care about SEO?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Why on earth does a search engine care if you use them or another search engine? After all, you\u2019re not paying them? That\u2019s right, you aren\u2019t paying them\u2026but someone else is! So the answer to this question is that they care because they make their money from advertising. You are not the customer, you are the product!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The page you are delivered to after you enter a search query is called the search engine results page (aka SERP). The SERP presents you with what are called \u201corganic results\u201d as well as \u201cpay-per-click ads\u201d (or PPC). The organic results are those that are influenced by SEO, while the PPC ads are paid for.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You cannot pay <a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/blog\/google-vs-microsoft-bing-how-the-search-giants-stack-up\/\">Google or any search<\/a> engine to occupy any position in the organic results.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, the ads on the page are how they make their money. So, the better the results they deliver you, the more likely you and others are use that search engine again. The more people using the search engine, the more ads they can show and the more money they can make. Make sense?<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>Why care about how SEO works?<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Internet has really put the world at our fingertips. We are usually not more than a few clicks away from almost any information we could be looking for. When people are looking for information, services, products, and so on, they go online.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Try to remember the moment you thought, \u201cI should really look up how <a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/blog\/digital-marketing\/the-ultimate-guide-to-search-engine-optimization-seo\/\">search engine optimization<\/a> works.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You knew exactly what to do: You got on the Internet and you searched for \u201chow SEO works.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What did you do then?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Odds are you clicked on one of the first few results, at least initially. If you didn\u2019t find a site that met your expectations, you probably clicked the back button and scrolled down the page until you found what you were looking for.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If your site isn\u2019t properly optimized, it\u2019s safe to assume you\u2019re only coming up on the first page for your branded search queries \u2014 although depending on the name of your business, that might not even be the case.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That means people who don\u2019t know you exist but are looking for someone like you will never find you, and you\u2019ll never even have a chance to tell them why you\u2019re better than the competition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s right: Without SEO, you\u2019re giving leads away.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The good news is you\u2019re making it really easy on your competitors who are doing SEO. Odds are, they are loving you for not putting up a fight.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So, who cares how search engines deliver results? You definitely should!<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>A technical explanation of how SEO works<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So now you know why search engines work so hard to provide you with great results and why you should care, we can talk about how SEO works in a little more detail.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Search engines have spiders \u2014 not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">These spiders collect all kinds of information about your website and the pages that make up your site. This allows them to easily determine when to serve a searcher a page on your site. They collect things like page speed, title tags, social signals, internal linking, backlinks, and so on.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With over 200 ranking factors used by Google in their algorithm, there are a lot of things to consider, and actions that can be taken to try to optimize a website. There are both on-page and off-page ranking factors that determine how well your site is optimized, and therefore how well it ranks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The on-page factors are exactly what they sound like: Things that are actually on the page. This includes title tags, content, site speed, page URLs, image alt tags, internal linking, and more. Off-page factors, meanwhile, are almost entirely based on links to your site from other sites.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s important to keep in mind that these bots are automated computer programs and not actual humans.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As you might imagine, that means they have some limitations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They can\u2019t access a website like you or I would because they don\u2019t actually see the website: they crawl the code of the website. This means they can\u2019t see images or videos, nor are they impressed by flashy designs or audio clips.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In fact, they can\u2019t even comprehend content like we do!<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><b>You know how SEO works, now make it work for you!<\/b><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Optimizing your website for search engines isn\u2019t an insurmountable task by any means. If you\u2019re a little less technically inclined, you might find it to be challenging, but you can always reach out to a web strategist for help.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/?utm_source=Website&amp;utm_medium=Blog&amp;utm_campaign=WhatIsSEO\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Digital Cauldron<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> is an SEO agency that has many years of experience optimizing client websites to make them more attractive to search engines. Whether you\u2019re brand new to SEO or want to take your optimization to the next level, we\u2019re eager and willing to help you out!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/contact\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Get in touch<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> with an SEO expert at<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/?utm_source=Website&amp;utm_medium=Blog&amp;utm_campaign=WhatIsSEO\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Digital Cauldron<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> today to discuss how we can optimize your website with a<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/thedigitalcauldron.com\/Services\/seo-optimization\/?utm_source=Website&amp;utm_medium=Blog&amp;utm_campaign=WhatIsSEO\"> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">custom SEO plan<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. We can\u2019t wait to hear from you!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The search engine you used didn\u2019t randomly pick this page out of the sky and send you here hoping it would answer how search engine optimization works. In fact, it used a very complex algorithm to determine which of the millions of pages it has indexed on the subject of SEO would be most appropriate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,35,24],"tags":[22,23,25,26,47,30,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7006"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tdc.thedigitalcauldron.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}