To better appreciate the importance of Search Engine Optimization, its best to understand first, how search engines work. To provide some context, when a user carries out a search on a search engine such as Google, the search engines employs the use of an algorithm in real time to present the user what the search engine deems the most “relevant” result. In achieving this, the search engine goes through its index of billions of web pages and other related online content to provide results that best match the search terms. The question then is: how does the search engine determine the best match?

Following the filed patents of search engines such as Google, it’s easy to conclude that search engines prioritize websites on the following grounds. 

• Relevancy

This is perhaps the most important part of a search engine’s functionality. If you carry out a search for “best holiday destinations”, you certainly won’t be interested in seeing results about construction. This is why a search engine scours through its index of websites for websites or web pages that closely related to the topic or keyword. This is still not simple as it seems. Considering there are millions, even billions of search results for a single keyword, the search engine is unable to simply rank the most closely related web pages to the key word at the topic. For example, a google search for the best holiday destinations has 4.8 billion results. Since you can’t possibly go through the entire results, search engines have prioritize the results, putting the very best results top for the users. In achieving this, search engines have to employ other elements such as

• Authority

This is the search engine’s method of determining the accuracy and trustworthiness of online content.

To do this, the search engine considers the number of webpages that are linked to a page. These links from other pages are called back links. Usually, the more backlinks that a web page has, the higher it ranks on search engines.

Interestingly, this element is a new functionality used by more recent and sophisticated search engines such as Google. 

• Usefulness

Not every content that is relevant and authoritative is useful to a search engine user. Search engines optimizes their indexes to position only the most useful content at the top of search results.

To determine usefulness, search engines consider what is known as “User Experience Signals”. This relates to user interaction with search results. To put it simply, search engines rank content that users enjoy and visit more.