What is Digital Marketing?
A beginner-friendly guide to digital marketing: what it is, the main channels, and how to get started.
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When someone types a question into Google, results appear in less than a second. That speed is possible because search engines have already done the work in advance. They follow three steps: crawl, index and rank.
Step 1: Crawl
Search engines use automated programs called crawlers (Google's is called Googlebot) that move from link to link across the web, discovering new and updated pages. If no links point to your page and it is not in your sitemap, crawlers may never find it.
What you can do:
- Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console.
- Link your important pages to each other (internal linking).
- Make sure your robots.txt file is not blocking key pages.
Step 2: Index
After crawling a page, the search engine tries to understand it: the topic, the keywords, the images, and how it relates to other pages. It then stores the page in its index, a huge library of the web. Pages that are not indexed cannot appear in results at all.
What you can do:
- Write a unique title and meta description for every page.
- Use clear headings (H1, H2, H3) that describe the content.
- Add alt text to images.
- Avoid duplicate content across pages.
Step 3: Rank
When a person searches, the engine pulls the most relevant pages from its index and orders them. Hundreds of signals affect this order, but the most important are relevance to the search, content quality, page speed, mobile-friendliness and trust signals such as links from other websites.
What you can do:
- Target keywords your customers actually search for.
- Answer the searcher's question better than anyone else.
- Make your site fast and easy to use on mobile.
- Earn backlinks from reputable websites in your industry.
The takeaway
SEO is not a trick. It is the practice of making your website easy to find, easy to understand and genuinely useful. Get these basics right and the rankings follow.
