Organic search marketing, sometimes known as search engine optimization (SEO), is the process of making a website and its content highly visible and relevant for both search engines and human searchers. SEO is a process that includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engines to find and index a site for the appropriate keywords, as well as other digital internet marketing oriented tasks to make a site more appealing to users. Successful search marketing helps a site gain top positioning for relevant words and phrases on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How Does SEO Work?

In the world of digital internet marketing, the main search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! use techniques which are classed as “crawler based” and these search engines “crawl” the Web by means of a “web spider”. The web spider is a powerful computer program that accesses thousands of web pages and records what it finds on those websites and pages. These spider programs possess a level of “intelligence” allowing them to make fairly sophisticated judgements on relevancy of website content and store the information in its database. When you search on one of these systems, you’re actually searching the records in the spider’s database.

The spiders operate constantly and “crawl” the web. Once your site is on a spider’s list, it will return periodically and any changes to your site will get recorded on the search engines’ index database.  Different spider programs operate in different ways but most look at page titles, body text and other elements that play a role in how the page is given relevancy.

Crawler Based Search Engines Use the Spiders To Do Three Things:

• It visits the Web page
• It then follows links to other pages within the site
• It then returns to the site on a regular basis to identify site changes

The information the spider finds goes into the “index”. The index is a huge electronic list containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a website changes, the index is updated with the new information. These updates can take a while sometimes – weeks or even months.  Until the site is indexed, it is not available to any searchers. Therefore, if you have a new site, it is crucial to submit your website to the search engines as soon as the site has been launched.

What Does SEO Do For Online Businesses?

A well thought out SEO approach should be a key part of your digital internet marketing plan to establish your online business and has three main benefits:

• Increase rankings in major search engines
• Improve volume of quality traffic
• Increase brand awareness and recognition