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Hello there! How did you end up here? You must have been searching for how search engine optimization (SEO) works or something closely related. Whether you used Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other means to land here on this page, were glad youre here to learn how SEO works.

Keep reading to learn more about how SEO optimization works and how to optimize your site for search in this SEO starter guide. If youre looking for a quick analysis of your SEO, enter your URL here to audit your SEO instantly and receive custom recommendations for making SEO work for you!

Lets get the formalities out of the way (andanswer your question).

SEO stands for search engine optimization, adigital marketing strategythat focuses on improving your websites position in search results on search engines like Google.

Since search engines use hundreds of factors to generate search results Google uses more than 200 SEO works by optimizing your site for these factors, along withgetting your site crawled and indexed.

When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics, like keyword research, content creation, and page speed optimization, to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.

Search engine optimization is the product of search engines search engine companies develop ranking factors and use those factors to determine the most relevant content for a search. However, before a search engine can determine the most relevant content, it must crawl and index it.

Once crawling and indexing happen, a search engine will analyze pages against its ranking factors, like:

Keep in mind that search engines do not publish their ranking factors.

Based on the search engines analysis, your content might appear in organic search results, which means you can start bringing free and relevant traffic to your site!

The difference between organic search and paid search is organic search is free and paid search is paid.

When you submit a search to a search engine, the results display paid and organic listings paid listings will have the word Ad attached to them. Click on a paid listing and the advertiser will pay for that click. Click on an organic listing and the website owner will pay nothing.

While paid search is valuable and has its uses, organic searchs return on investment (ROI) makes SEO a smart investment for any business. Thats why its important to learn what SEO is and how SEO works because you can use that knowledge to improve your sites search result rankings and traffic numbers.

Learn more:Organic Search vs. Paid Search

You can categorize SEO tactics into three buckets:

Both on-page, off-page, and technical SEO aim to make your site more friendly, as well as trustworthy, to users and search engines. When search engine crawlerssee how friendly your website is to them and users, it increases the chances that your site will rank well for different searches.

Learn more:Types of SEO

Every guide on how SEO works should explain the types of SEO strategies, which are:

If you want to make SEO work for your business long-term, invest in a white-hat SEO strategy. While black-hat SEO may deliver quick results, it will eventually result in penalties against your site, whether decreased rankings or removal from Googles index.

Learn more:White-Hat SEO GuideandBlack-Hat SEO Guide

When it comes to learning how SEO works, its often helpful to have an example.

So, say you have two websites: Website A and Website B.

Website A isntresponsive, 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.

For search engines, its an easy decision which website is more friendly: Website A.

Of course, how search engines work is a bit more complicated than that. Today, search engines usemore than 200 different factorsto generate search results, which means a lot of different elements influence your placement in search results.

Congrats! You now know how SEO works. How can you make SEO marketing work for your business, though? And by work for you, we mean help your company increase its rankings and traffic,plusits online revenue.

Well, you can start with these resources, which weve organized by SEO element. Check them out!

Keyword research is critical to how SEO works because keywords signal to search engines a pages topic. Thats why keywords often feature in title tags, header tags, and throughout content. The key, though, is learning how to research and integrate keywords.

Learn how with these guides:

How does search engine optimization work? With content! Content is a core component of SEO. If you want to use SEO to bring traffic and revenue to your site, you need to learn how to develop, create, and promote SEO content.

Heres how to get started:

Header tags, which include title tags, meta descriptions, and more, are another critical SEO factor. Make SEO work for your business by learning how to create SEO- and user-friendly header tags that showcase your contents relevance and usefulness.

Check out these resources to get started:

SEO works with on-page, off-page, and technical SEO. Web design is a big component of technical SEO and requires collaboration with developers and designers. Thats why its important to educate yourself so you can inform designers and developers of SEO best practices.

Explore these resources to get started:

Structured data is a fantastic way to better communicate a pages content. Learn how to use structured data to share information about your organization, authors, page content, and more with these resources for SEO beginners:

Create a faster website that delivers a better user experience with page speed optimizations. Learn how to make this ranking factor work for your SEO with these resources for beginner SEOs and web developers looking to improve their knowledge:

Understand how SEO works even better with these resources on crawling and indexing, which are the basis for SEO and search engine functions.

Optimize for one of the most talked-about SEO ranking factors with these resources for link building:

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.

Try to remember the moment you thought, I should really look up how search engine optimization works.

You knew exactly what to do: You got on the Internet and you searched for how SEO works.

What did you do then?

Odds are you clicked on one of the first few results, at least initially. If you didnt 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.

If your site isnt properly optimized, its safe to assume youre only coming up on the first page for your branded search queries although depending on the name of your business, that might not even be the case.

That means people who dont know you exist but are looking for someone like you will never find you, and youll never even have a chance to tell them why youre better than the competition.

Thats right: Without SEO, youre giving leads away.

The good news is youre making it really easy on your competitors who are doing SEO. Odds are, they are loving you for not putting up a fight.

So, who cares how search engines deliver results? You definitely should!

Why on earth does a search engine care if you use them or another search engine? After all, youre not paying them? Thats right, you arent paying thembut someone else is! So the answer to this question is that they care because they make their money from advertising.

The page you are delivered to after you enter asearch queryis called thesearch engine results page (aka SERP). The SERP presents you with what are called organic results as well as pay-per-click ads (or PPC). The organic results are those that are influenced bySEO, while thePPC adsare paid for.

You cannot pay Google or any search engine to occupy any position in the organic results.

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?

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.

Search engines havespiders not the creepy kind, but the automated robot kind.

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 likepage speed,title tags,social signals,internal linking,backlinks, and so on.

Withover 200 ranking factorsused 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.

Theon-page factorsare 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.

Its important to keep in mind that these bots are automated computer programs and not actual humans.

As you might imagine, that means they have some limitations.

They cant access a website like you, or I would because they dont actually see the website: they crawl the code of the website. This means they cant see images or videos, nor are they impressed by flashy designs or audio clips.

In fact, they cant even comprehend content like we do!

Clutch has personally interviewed more than 250 WebFX clients to discuss their experience partnering with us.

Optimizing your website for search engines isnt an insurmountable task by any means. If youre a little less technically inclined, you might find it to be challenging, but you can always reach out to a web strategist for help.

WebFX is anSEO agencythat has many years of experience optimizing client websites to make them more attractive to search engines. Whether youre brand new to SEO or want to take your optimization to the next level, were eager and willing to help you out!

Get in touch with an SEO expert at WebFX today to discuss how we can optimize your website with acustom SEO plan. We cant wait to hear from you!

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SEO: What Is SEO and How Does SEO Work? | 2022 Starter Guide - WebFX