Introduction to SEO

Despite the fact that most of the time I still program, I decided to touch on such a slippery topic. With this note, I will start a series of posts about the so-called SEO. I do not claim one hundred percent correctness or completeness (moreover) of the material presented. In general, these notes are actually initially addressed to one person, but as practice shows, they may be useful to a larger number of readers. The style of presentation will be as simplified and adapted as possible for beginners. This will be "The truth. but not the whole truth" =). Let's call it SEO lessons for beginners.

So. What is SEO? The abbreviation SEO stands for Search Engines Optimization. It also means that for anyone who speaks and writes about SEO optimization (which unfortunately happens very often), an exorcist is required (philologists call it tautology).

What is all this for?

Suppose you have created a website, or someone has created it for you, and you have started filling it with content. It seems good, and the content seems interesting. But there is only one visitor. Or two. One is clear. It's you. Why 2, you might ask? Because you entered from a second browser. And you have a dynamic IP. =) But let's not get distracted.

In order for you to have visitors, someone needs to know about your website. You can tell friends, relatives, colleagues. You can even post it on your page in a social network. But here's the problem: it won't cause an explosion. In the first few days, your acquaintances may visit you, but once they satisfy their curiosity, it will be difficult to make them come back. It will only be possible if you are a famous person even without your website. But in that case, you would not be reading these lines ;)

So how do websites get over 9000 visitors a day?

The answer is very simple: the majority of progressive humanity uses search engines to find information.

The ideal way to increase the number of visitors is to add a link to your website in the search results.

But for a search engine to add your project to the search results, it needs to know about its existence.

To be honest, the work of search engines is a topic for a separate note. Have you ever wondered why searching for information on your computer is so slow (when using search tools), while in a search engine it is practically instant (less than a second)?

Everything is quite simple. When searching on your computer, the data is actually searched in all your directories and hidden places. Even in hidden folders with pornography =) (Of course, it all depends on the criteria, but I think the essence is clear).

A search engine, on the other hand, searches differently. I think it is intuitively understandable that after entering a search phrase, the system does not start physically searching for it on all websites. It simply does not have enough resources for that. And the websites would not last long (long live the DDOS attack! =))

A search engine keeps an index (the academic term is search index). But what does this index represent? No one knows. It's a trade secret. ;) But in simple terms and in terms of understanding, it should be a semantic network, a database that allows matching a search phrase with places where content that corresponds to it can be found. The important thing is that the search engine searches its own database.

Note: Of course, file systems also have an index, moreover, there are special tools for indexed search. What was said above is just an example.

A search engine stores not only the match of a phrase to a resource in its index, but also the relevance . Relevance is how much, according to the search engine, the search results correspond to the query. Most search engines sort the results based on relevance.

But let's go back to the index. As you can see, the index is not the current state of a website or resource. Constant synchronization of the content of websites with the index of the search engine is necessary. This process is not instantaneous. Search robots periodically visit a website and scan its content. Based on this, they form an "impression" of the resource. This "impression" is what goes into the search index.

The details of such indexing will be discussed in the following notes. For now, let's just focus on the fact that you need to inform the search engine about your website. Otherwise, it simply won't know what to look for, among other things, on your website. You can inform the search engine about your website in 2 ways.

1 - passively wait for the search engine to find you itself. It can do this only if there is a link to your website on an already indexed resource (telepathy is not yet developed in search robots).

2 - manually add a link to the so-called add url page (from English "add url") - a special page of the search engine for adding resources. How to find this page is a separate conversation. It is better to ask the search engine itself (using a query like "add website to Google"). Sometimes, this may even require logging into the webmaster panel, but fortunately, this is rare.

That's all for now - this introductory note turned out to be long, mainly due to lyrical digressions. In the next posts, I will try to consider more specific actions.