What is SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization), in the most general terms, is the name given to the whole process of generating traffic from free, natural and editorial search results to sites.

All major search engines (Google, Bing) have categorized search results and algorithms they use to generate those search results. Every major search engine categorizes the search results within their own algorithm and ranks them under categories such as images, videos, classic website results, and news.

At this point, SEO is the algorithmic work applied in order for a website to rank better on the search results (SERP) and to benefit more from the free traffic source.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Search engines are one of the most important building blocks of the modern world as today’s huge digital libraries. Especially when we consider the development of the internet, in today’s technology world, you can reach detailed articles about a subject within seconds and you can easily access quality content that develops in parallel with the increasing competition quality.

Unlike large libraries, search engines compile a large amount of information very quickly, bringing them together to answer the simplest user queries without the need for high storage and search costs.

When you do a search on Google as an internet user, it will bring the most relevant content and website to your query, which includes the best and closest answer to your search query, by utilizing its improved algorithm.

This algorithm, developed by Google to increase the user experience, forms the basis of today’s SEO studies.

Within this algorithm and similar algorithms, the working logic of search engines basically consists of 3 stages;

1. Crawling
2. Indexing
3. Ranking

What is Search Engine Crawling?

Search engine crawling process is basically the name given to the exploratory review processes carried out by search engine bots (spiders, robots) on the internet. During this discovery and review process, search engine bots find newly published or updated content on the internet by searching and include them in the crawling and indexing processes.

The structures that search engine bots include in the crawling process on the Internet are not just plain URLs (web pages). All content such as pdf, image, video, etc., which are not closed to scanning by any command in the internet world, are processed by search engine bots within the scanning processes. Regardless of the format, the only constant rule regarding the scanning processes is that search engine bots find all kinds of content on the internet only through links.

The process by which search engine bots discover any URL on the internet basically relies on following a different link (url) on any url visited by the bots. When search engine bots x visit a site or URL, another url on the relevant url is found by being followed by the bots. If this url is a previously undiscovered URL, it is processed within the crawling process and processed to be saved in the Google index, database.

What is Search Engine Indexing?

The contents (URL addresses) found by the search engine bots during the crawling processes are created within the relevant process and sent to the search engine bots to be saved in the index. After this process, all content that is not technically problematic, especially during the creation and display process by the search engine, is saved in the Google index to be shown in the search queries made by the users. All this registration process and creation in the database is called Indexing.

What is Search Engine Ranking?

When any user performs a query on the search engine, the search engine sorts the contents that it deems most relevant to the relevant search query in the database, within certain ranking factors, and presents it to the user’s use. In this process, the process of determining which content is the best content for the search query and then determining the quality and relevance of the content in the following ranking is called search engine ranking.

In today’s internet world, search engines create special rankings for search queries by analyzing websites and contents over many metrics within the current and very advanced algorithms they have developed in parallel with the increasing number of websites.

The most important issue to be considered here is that search engine bots examine the content and pages. In other words, in the ranking process, a website’s x content may be ranked first in one query and may be ranked 70th in another query. Here, the review for each query and page is performed repeatedly, specific to that page and query.

In particular, the most important factor that makes search engine optimization an expert at this point and intensifies the competition of brands with each other is this very comprehensive, branched, search engine ranking algorithm with in-depth metrics and factors.