What Is SEO and How Search Engines Work

What SEO is

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the work of helping your pages rank higher in the organic (unpaid) results of search engines like Google. Higher rankings mean more free, high-intent traffic – people actively searching for what you offer.

Crawl, index, rank

Search engines do three things:

• Crawl: a bot (Googlebot) follows links across the web to discover pages.
• Index: it reads each page, understands its topic, and stores it in a giant database.
• Rank: when someone searches, it orders indexed pages by how relevant and trustworthy they are for that query.

The three pillars of SEO

Everything in SEO falls into three areas, and you need all three:

• On-page: the content and HTML of your pages.
• Technical: how well your site can be crawled and rendered.
• Off-page: how much other sites trust and link to you.

Key points

• SEO earns free, high-intent traffic from organic search.
• Search engines crawl, index and then rank pages.
• Ranking rewards relevance and trust for the specific query.
• Good SEO combines on-page, technical and off-page work.