What is SEO and how does it work?

As soon as you open your default browser on your phone or computer, it opens up a search engine that has an empty box waiting for you to fill. When you type something in, whatever it is, the search engine’s artificial intelligence (AI) quickly scans the world wide web to find anything and everything that is relevant. The AI is smart enough to locate, verify, collect, and index that information for you in a list of results on several pages all in a few milliseconds. It doesn’t just pick any web page to expose to its users, so it simultaneously uses its own qualification system to put better websites on the first few pages. The “better” websites may have more effective SEO or just be considered more reputable than others. Unlike websites that appear more prominently because they’ve been paid for, you can’t pay a search engine to recognize websites that have been organically optimized.

This means that search engines are designed to find relevant, authoritative, and safe pages, to make sure that users experience an efficient search and results process. That’s why it’s necessary that you prime your website to have all these attributes so that search engines respond with your web page above and before others. SEO helps your website rank higher and that means potential customers will see it sooner, hopefully sooner than possible competitors. Good SEO will mean a good position on results pages. Good is defined by how high up you rank. The first page is ultimately the goal here because users are not likely to go further than that if they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for. Floodgate Digital data found that only 25 percent of users go as far as the second page