How does SEO work? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves the relationship between a website and search engines. The fundamental process of SEO involves identifying search queries (keywords) for which a website's pages are relevant, and finding ways to increase the visibility of those pages for such queries—both on search engines and within the website's own internal search system.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of improving the relationship between websites and search engines. The first attempts to define what SEO is and how it functions were made in the 1990s. Much of what was understood back then remains relevant today; however, there are now far more ways to enhance the relationship between websites and search engines than there were in the 1990s. Optimization entails striving to ensure the best possible performance for a website within search results—in other words, the goal is to attract relevant visitors or referrals that will help achieve the website's objectives.
SEO works through the following methods:
- Improving the crawlability of the site
- Managing the crawling process
- Controlling the indexability of the site's content
- Publishing unique, helpful, and informative content
- Acquiring effective links from other sites
- Keeping the website well-organized and concise, so that visitors can quickly find the relevant and useful results they need
- Ensuring that the website complies with search engine guidelines
- Regularly updating content to remain aligned with the interests of those conducting searches
- Identifying areas for improvement by measuring performance
1. Improving the site's crawlability
Making a website crawlable is not as simple as it might seem. There is a vast difference between a 10-page website and one with 10 million pages. Search engines themselves determine how many pages they will crawl and the frequency with which they will crawl each page. This is known as the 'crawl budget'—something you have no direct control over.The role of an SEO specialist is to provide search engines with as many compelling reasons as possible to crawl a page, while also ensuring that the page is technically accessible for crawling. A website's crawlability depends on factors such as its navigation, page structure, server performance, and various other elements.
The SEO process improves crawlability by ensuring the following:
- Internal navigation (links) connects to all pages (URLs) published on the site.
- The “rel='nofollow'” attribute is not used in internal navigation (links).
- The “nofollow” robots meta directive is not used on published pages.
- The “robots.txt” file blocks only those pages (URLs) that should not be included in the index.
- There are links from other websites pointing to as many pages (URLs) of the site as possible.
- The server delivers content to crawlers quickly and completely.
- Unwanted bots and crawlers are blocked to prevent them from misusing server resources.
- Pages are designed in such a way that search algorithms can analyze (parse) them (to discover links and information).
2. Managing crawls
Crawl monitoring is an integral part of crawl management. We must ensure that search engines crawl precisely the pages we intend for them to crawl; furthermore, it is essential to verify that any issues that arise are effectively resolved. A common complaint regarding Google is that it sometimes fails to index content. Yet, many of those frustrated by this issue never bother to check whether Googlebot is actually fetching their pages in the first place.Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is only effective when you understand how search engines work—at least at a fundamental level. Ignoring these basic aspects of crawler behavior leads to a waste of your time and can result in financial losses for your clients or employers.
We monitor crawls in the following way:
- Monitoring live traffic
- Analyzing web server logs
- Analyzing search engine indexing reports
- Analyzing search engine crawl error reports
All SEO experts should be aware of these common crawling issues and keep an eye on them.
- Broken (non-functional) URLs (where no content is displayed)
- Displaying the same content across two or more URLs (duplicate content)
- Improper or non-existent canonicalization for duplicate content
- Slow server response times (including timeout errors)
- Excessive redirects from an original URL to the current URL (a single redirect is ideal)
People still fear duplicate content; however, you will not face any penalties for it. When a search engine encounters duplicate content on a site, it determines which version of that content to display in its search results. As an SEO specialist, your role is to ensure that the search engine makes the right decision—not to waste time worrying about a hypothetical "duplicate content penalty."
For more details, please refer to my article on "Basic Crawl Management."
3. Managing website indexability
By indexability, I mean the pages on the site should not only be available to the search engine crawlers, they should be correctly coded and organized in a consistent manner. Whether you use structured markup is a business decision. The SEO decision is to ensure that every page make sense to both a human visitor and a multitude of search engine algorithms, each performing specialized tasks.
Merely publishing a Web document (page) does not ensure it is easy to index. Search engines attempt to index many different types of documents but when you embed executable code (PHP, Javascript, or anything else) in those documents the situation becomes tricky. Also, if you use an interactive platform (coded in Javascript) to dynamically retrieve and publish data to a URL, the search engine probably won’t see the content you’re fetching after the page is loading. That’s what indexability is all about.
SEO manages indexability by:
- Allowing crawlers to collect (crawl) your pages
- Allowing crawlers to index the content of your pages
- Including as much indexable content as possible on the collected pages
- Limiting or removing duplicate content (ensuring each URL presents unique content)
- Using high-quality, standard HTML markup
- Using specific HTML markup recognized by search engines (such as rich snippets or structured data)
- Ensuring the correct use of HTML code
- Providing indexable links (so that search engines can “see” and follow them)
The type of content used on a page is significant for indexing. For instance, images are not indexed in the same way as text. For meaningful images, it is a good practice to include descriptive "ALT=" text and helpful captions. While captions are not mandatory, they can be beneficial; if adding a caption is not feasible, similar descriptive content can be placed near the image.
Image galleries can present certain challenges—for example, when the owners of the images (such as artists or photographers) are reluctant to display high-resolution images or visible text on the page. In such cases, an SEO specialist must strike a balance between maintaining the page's aesthetic appeal and ensuring the inclusion of indexable content.
Furthermore, search engines may not index text that is delivered via push notifications. Consequently, an SEO specialist must find an optimal balance between the desired functionality of a page and the necessity of incorporating indexable content.
The requirements for indexing often conflict with aesthetic requirements.
In many scenarios the SEO decision for a given page settles on compromises between conflicting needs. Search engine optimization only works when it supports the business decision. No site should be designed “for SEO”. The site should be designed to accomplish the publisher’s goals and to satisfy the visitor’s needs.
Sometimes, the SEO specialist should ignore popular formulaic approaches to organizing and publishing content. SEO works best when it strikes a balance between the desired appearance and functionality of a page and the desired crawling and indexing of the page.
See my article How to Manage Website Subduction to learn about and understand a common indexability problem on large Websites, especially blogs.
4. Publishing unique, helpful, and informative content
Everything depends on content.Search engines aim to present only the best content to their users.
Skilled SEO experts work to provide high-quality content to search engines. However, given the billions of queries users perform every month, there is no single, universal method to define what constitutes "the best content." An SEO expert must operate within a specific "query space"—a term that encompasses all searches related to a particular topic, along with the relevant pages that search engines display in response to those searches.
For instance, when working on a subject like "horse saddles," the goal of SEO is to make the site's content more effective, helpful, and comprehensive. SEO experts must also ensure that important or targeted keywords are not overused on less relevant pages; this helps minimize internal competition for those keywords across the site.
Beyond factors like writing quality, word count, or structural organization, content can be considered "the best" if it is unique, helpful, and valuable—specifically, if it fulfills a user's needs better than any other available content.
Nevertheless, by analyzing thousands or even millions of pages across various query spaces, search engines may develop expectations for specific types of content or structures. In such cases, even the best content might end up with a lower ranking in search results.
SEO experts must strike a balance: they need to incorporate structured markup while ensuring that content creators retain the freedom to express ideas in their own natural, authentic style. Structured markup is not always the best approach. The primary purpose of content is to provide information to site visitors, while the role of SEO is to support that content.
Content quality is of utmost importance; yet, in my view, at least half of the people in the SEO industry hold a serious misconception about this.
5. Attracting Helpful Links from Other Sites
But search engines have always used other signals to assess the quality and relevance of content. Certain Web marketers have promoted false ideas such as “links are the most important factor [in the search ranking algorithms]” and “all you need are links”. These false ideas, when followed, have led to hundreds of thousands or millions of Website penalties and algorithmic downgrades. You’re not optimizing for search when you set your site up for that kind of failure.
Helpful, informative links provide descriptive cues to visitors about what they will find on a Website. The descriptive cues do not have to be included in the link anchor text. Helpful, informative links are always placed in a context that gives meaning and value to the links. Search engines may or may not analyze the context of the links.
The reason you want natural, helpful, informative links is that you don’t want to have to constantly replace links ignored by the search engines and you don’t want to suffer from penalties and downgrades. Link acquisition should happen without anxiety.
The natural growth of a Website’s backlink profile is a strong indication of the true competitive quality of the site’s content. Most Websites never earn very many links. Search engines understand this and award those sites with appropriate traffic based on other signals used by their algorithms.
However, in recent years marketers have become paranoid about the wrong kind of natural links. See my article How Do You Know If a Link Is Safe? for more information about what marketers are doing wrong. Another good article is Toxic Backlink Myths and How to Know Which Links are Really Bad.
6. Ensure that the website is well-organized and concise.
SEO works on every aspect of Website design and construction, and that includes content organization. The SEO provider should understand how a typical visitor uses the site, and how they’ll find what they are looking for if they land on the wrong page.Efficient use of content is necessary to create a positive experience for the visitor. Ideally they find what they are looking for quickly, they extract the information they need, and they take whatever actions they desire without obstruction. Anything that slows down the visitor journey is friction. Search engine optimization should work to reduce friction because, some people theorize, the search engine algorithms are better at ignoring high-friction pages. In fact, some algorithms eliminate friction altogether by displaying information directly in the search results.
We have more rules for what not to do with content today than we did in the 1990s. Efficient content organization includes reducing, minimizing, or eliminating obstructive page components that may negatively impact how search engines assess the quality of a page.
Efficient content organization seeks to reduce, minimize, or eliminate unnecessary on-page elements without compromising the creator’s free expression. SEO must support the style of the content creator, not dictate it. By allowing content creators to express themselves as they wish, search engine optimization specialists push themselves to expand their own skills beyond formulaic check list SEO.
Efficient content organization enhances the message without interfering with the content’s purpose. It’s not easy to explain this in simple, concise terms. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself if you want to change content “for SEO” or “for presentation”. If you are only thinking of the SEO benefit of the proposed change then it’s the wrong change.
Presentation is more important than perceived rules of optimization strategies. In the long term, the search engines will identify and reward effective presentation styles and methods. We have seen time and time again that artificially structured content which follows SEO rules becomes obsolete as search engines learn to recognize the patterns.
There is no single, optimal way to organize content either on the page or on the Website. SEO specialists who require that content be formatted to specific rules are taking shortcuts and reducing opportunities for content to establish its unique value.
See my article Website Navigation and Website Navigation Theory for more information about how to organize a site efficiently for a good user experience.
7. Ensuring the Website Complies with Search Engine Guidelines
It truly surprises me that, even in 2021, many web marketers completely disregard search engine guidelines. In fact, many of the questions posed by people seeking help in online discussions are already answered directly and clearly within these very guidelines.Search engine guidelines were primarily established because, for a long time, some overzealous web marketers had been exploiting search algorithms. The guidelines created by Bing, Google, and other search engines are, in large part, a response to deceptive marketing tactics. Think of these guidelines as a checklist that alerts you to actions that could lead to your website being penalized or seeing its search rankings drop.
Instead of investing time and effort into pushing website content or links to the absolute limit of what these guidelines permit, marketers would be far better off channeling that same energy into creating unique, engaging, and useful content. If the content were truly high-quality from the outset, there would be no need to scrutinize the guidelines in search of loopholes or shortcuts. In truth, genuinely useful—or "good" (high-quality)—content serves a purpose far greater than merely generating revenue for the publisher. There is nothing wrong with earning money, but you must prioritize the needs of your audience above all else. When you create with your audience in mind, they will respond in a way that no artificial search engine optimization (SEO) tactic could ever achieve.
Search engine guidelines help us distinguish between content that is genuinely useful and content created solely for the purpose of driving traffic from search engines. When a website drops in rankings due to search algorithms, incurs a penalty from a spam team, or is removed entirely from the search index, a crucial question arises: which pages on the site are receiving traffic from other sources, and why? By removing pages that cannot attract traffic without violating search engine guidelines, an SEO specialist can eliminate a major source of conflict or complication between the website and the search engine.
Search engine guidelines outline exactly where conflicts or complications can arise between a website and a search engine. Creating such complications between a website and a search engine is, in effect, the exact opposite of optimization.
8. Updating Content to Maintain Its Relevance to Searcher Interests
People who ask how SEO works often expect to be given a set of one-time strategies and tasks. “Set it and forget it” SEO does exist, but most Websites require at least some ongoing or periodic maintenance. And that work includes updating content to ensure it matches the queries and needs of contemporary searchers.As search engines find and share content from a Website, they match that content to the queries their searchers use. Those queries change over time and so the content should change with the queries. That’s an often overlooked priority.
Web marketers have long desired to attract more visitors through a growing body of queries. Hence, they keep looking for new queries to add to their list of targets – but they seldom if ever update the targets they’ve already collected. Worse, many marketers now publish and absurd amount of frivolous content in the hope of pleasing search algorithms that, ironically, seek to ignore frivolous content. The SEO specialist must find a balance between growth in query-driven traffic and limiting content to just what is needed by the site and its visitors.
Creating content for the sake of matching queries is inefficient and leads to algorithmic downgrades. In some cases it may lead to spam penalties. A thought leader creates queries naturally by stimulating interest in new topics, leading people to search for more information about new subjects.
We use search engine optimization to monitor the queries that drive traffic to a page, to improve the quality of the content on the page to better match those queries, and to modify or expand content (where appropriate) to match overlooked queries. But that doesn’t mean search engine optimization is limited to chasing queries. Worse, if you spend all your time looking at “keyword data” from SEO tools, you’ll miss something important in your own site’s data.
The query language or search lexicon of a page often looks very different from the content creator’s assumptions about what phrases and words are relevant to the content.
We use keyword research to identify potentially useful queries for growth; but you must maintain the content you’ve already created. Keyword research is often abused by aggressive Web marketers who pursue an endless keyword strategy. Endless Keyword marketing continually adds keyword targets to a Website’s list of desired queries. This leads to an overabundance of content production and production standards suffer.
Proper keyword research identifies missed opportunities as opposed to new keywords that have no relevance to the site’s primary goal. Missed opportunities are most easily found in the query data provided by search engines rather than in SEO tools that aggregate keyword data from across the spectrum.
We also use keyword research to identify the types of queries users prefer in a specific market vertical. When the site owner has no real idea of what queries people use to find content like their own, the SEO specialist must use keyword discovery to identify queries that can be helpful to the site’s existing content. The content may need to be (almost always must be) adjusted to better match those queries.
See my articles Fundamental Principles of Keyword Analysis and Search Optimization and the Keyword Matrix for more details about keyword optimization.
9. Measuring Performance to Determine Where Improvement Is Still Needed
Monitoring Website performance is the most difficult challenge in search engine optimization. We have many metrics to choose from, but none of them are perfect. Worse, many tools that collect data do so imperfectly either because of the flawed assumptions of the tool creators or the natural limitations of the type of data being collected. Here are examples of common SEO metrics.Direct visits consist of all page requests that are made without any referer data. Direct visits might represent people clicking on bookmarks, people clicking on links that open in new browser windows, people copying and pasting URLs into their browser address bars, and search (or non-search) referrals that don’t pass any referrer data.
Errors record page requests that failed. Server errors are identified by status codes. HTML markup errors are identified passively by crawlers. Major search engines report errors in their dashboards Search engine optimization works best when errors are identified and corrected.
Non-search referrals consist of direct visits and other site referrals; they count the number of landings that occur from non-search sources. These metrics may not be entirely reliable for various reasons. For example, some search referrals may be misidentified as direct visits.
Other site referrals are attributed to visitors clicking on links on other sites. Some spam tools are used to inflate these referral statistics with the goal of tricking the Website owner into visiting the sites mentioned in the referer field. Fake referral traffic is a widespread problem.
Page views count the number of times a specific URL was requested. Page views are easy to filter by type of URL and they do not depend on start and end times the way sessions and visits do. However, page views can be inflated by excessive repetitive requests from inappropriate sources.
Search referrals are usually divided into organic (unpaid) and PPC (paid or pay-per-click) referrals. Search referrals are easy to filter by search engine but require a little extra effort to distinguish between unpaid and paid visits. Search referral data can be misidentified and faked. Search referral data may be reported within different parameters by various analytics tools; none of the tools are necessarily wrong.
Sessions are used to represent visits and sometimes visitors, although a visitor may engage in multiple visits to a Website. One reason why sessions are a poor metric is that there is no reliable method for identifying when a session begins and ends. All session definitions are arbitrary.
Visitors may be robots (software) or people. A visitor may return to a Website may times or may “stay” on the site for long periods of time. A visitor may be a potential customer or just a random wanderer on the Web.
Visits are not exactly the same as sessions. A visit may consist of a single URL request or it may consist of hundreds of URL requests made over a period of several days. Like sessions our metrics for measuring visits are arbitrary.
There are many other metrics that various reporting tools use. None of these metrics is perfect. None of these metrics is even close to perfect. All we can ask of an SEO metric is that it be consistent.
Search engine optimization works best with consistent metrics because that allows us to identify growth in traffic patterns, anomalous issues, and seasonal patterns in searcher behavior. We also want to know which visitors are receiving errors, what kinds of errors, and if those errors are degrading Website performance, user experience, and conversions.
You can browse the SEO Metrics category on this site for many articles about measurement and analysis.
Conclusion
Regardless of what various promotional claims on the internet might suggest, there is no such thing as a truly "definitive" or "complete" guide to SEO. A "definitive" guide would need to encompass everything, yet no single SEO guide can possibly cover every aspect. In fact, the more extensive a guide becomes, the more difficult it is for readers to grasp the core fundamentals. Search engine optimization cannot be effectively defined by a simple checklist; depending on one’s perspective, it is always possible to overlook certain elements or categorize them incorrectly.What we must understand is that search engine optimization begins with a fundamental premise: creating a website that is easy for search engines to crawl and index, and which aligns with the search queries made by users. Building upon this foundation, we can then introduce greater complexity or depth to our optimization strategies and practices.
SEO is most effective when it is tailored to the specific needs of an individual website, rather than forcing a website to conform to a rigid, one-size-fits-all SEO checklist. Applying the exact same set of actions to every website does not constitute genuine search engine optimization.
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