How Search Engines Work: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking Beginner’s Guide to SEO

If you run a business website, a quality SEO tool set is an investment that will definitely pay off. Not only will it help you make informed SEO decisions based on data, but it will also save you a lot of time. Website architecture is the hierarchical structure of your webpages and how they’re linked together.

The Search Essentials outline the most important elements of what makes your website eligible to appear on Google Search. While there’s no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google’s search results. SEO is about taking the next step and working on improving your site’s presence in Search. This guide will walk you through some of the most common and effective improvements you can do on your site. And the «Anchors» tab provides insights about the most used anchor texts in the backlinks. Here, you’ll see a detailed list of all the backlinks pointing to your website.

A sitemap is a structured list of all pages on a website available to be crawled by search engines. Having one is yet another way to let crawlers find all your pages. Today, I never create blogs below 2,000 words, if my goal is to rank for a focus keyword. Think about “how to make the post as relevant as possible”, not “how to stuff the post with keywords so that Google thinks it’s relevant”. Last but not least, you should use the focus keyword in the anchor text of your internal links. If your focus keyword is “outdoor sports” and you’ll feature an image of a man climbing the mountain, you don’t have to use the alt text “a man performing an outdoor sport”.

Topics in SEO Optimisation:

Patrick is a co-founder of Sitebulb, a technical SEO auditing tool. Advertising revenues accounted for more than 76% of the $348 billion that Google generated in 2024. So while search functions remain its core product, it depends on its advertising business. Because your navigation is at the top of the page, Google sees those links first. Let’s say you have two links pointing to a page on your site… and both of those links are on the same page.

• He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.
• When analyzing any change in your performance (e.g. sudden drop in clicks), always try to find the root of the problem by checking various dimensions to find what exactly caused the changes.
• Or use them as seed keywords and pop them into a keyword research tool.
• That’s because the calculations are based on slightly different metrics and algorithms.
• The lesson moves from identifying the signs of popularity to creating link-worthy content.

Best for Local SEO

This SEO tutorial lesson describes in-detail the three major Google search engine updates and the RankBrain algorithm. You will get an insight into a feature called “Not Provided” that you may encounter on your SEO quests. While you can implement SEO strategies yourself, hiring an expert may provide better results, especially if you lack experience. Professionals can offer insights, strategies, and efficiencies that may be hard to achieve alone. These tools can provide valuable insights and streamline your SEO efforts, making it easier to track progress and make data-driven decisions. Achieving these goals requires a well-rounded approach that balances both technical optimizations and content strategy.

For instance, use the KD% filter to identify keywords that are easier to rank for. When your content is useful and informative, it builds trust and positions your brand as an authority. This trust makes visitors more likely to remember you and eventually purchase from you down the road.

Without SEO, we’d have to spend over $0.5M SEO Anomaly on ads to get that traffic. Getting first-hand experience will teach you a lot about how SEO works and how to improve your skills! You can also explore our SEO FAQs to get answers to some of the most common SEO questions. So, when you practice SEO, you’ll prioritize certain factors over others.

If visitors don’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they might leave. Start small, then aim for more competitive terms as your site’s SEO performance improves. For example, a coffee shop owner might know that “best coffee shop” is a good keyword to target. But if you notice any important pages that you want to be eligible for rankings, work to identify and address the issue. Plus, people generally trust organic (free) results more than ads. When someone needs a product, service, or information, they head straight to Google.

After implementing on-page SEO techniques it’s useful to review your strategy and monitor results over time to ensure your practices are working. Changes can take a few months to take effect and algorithms change regularly. It’s advisable to look at your SEO rankings routinely even if you rank highly in search. If you’re still feeling stuck, consider bringing on an SEO specialist for further improvement. Adding keywords to your URL helps explain your page content to search engines and users, as well as reflecting where the page sits in your website.

This structured data powers rich snippets that boost both visibility and click-through rates. For instance, with Pape-Dawson, we applied LocalBusiness schema across all their location landing pages. This ensured each page delivered accurate, structured details, resulting in enhanced rich snippets and improved engagement from local searches.