Frankly, to actuate technical SEO to your benefit on any given website you will need a thorough understanding of how search engines work beginning with the information discovery process of the search engine bots, commonly referred to as Crawling. The discovery process begins with a known list of URLs. Search engines can discover these in several ways:

The role of robots.txt & robots meta tags: While XML sitemaps instruct robots on what pages are shortlisted for indexing, the role of the robots.txt file and robots meta tags is exactly the opposite. The former is primarily employed to restrict robots from crawling certain pages while specifying the the precise URL of your XML sitemap. The latter is primarily used to control Indexing, not without its own set of particularities and nuances.

If a crawler or search engine bot cannot access or efficiently navigate your website, your pages simply won’t be discovered and subsequently won’t appear in search results, regardless of their quality. Optimising your site’s crawlability through proper site structure, internal linking, sitemaps, and managing crawl budget is crucial for ensuring search engines effectively discover all your valuable pages and content within it.

Rendering is when search engines attempt to run a page’s code in order to extract key information from the crawled pages and perceive it as a user would. Understanding Rendering will enable you to ensure all the content that is part of any given page makes it into the search engine index in a predictable way and not only a part of it. Without this understanding parts of your onpage content might remain invisible to the systems meant to find it.

Learning how to ensure all your page content is accessible to search engine bots and fully rendered by them is primarily important because if only a part of the page content is accessed, it puts you at a disadvantage as the unrendered content, potentially including important keywords and internal links, won’t be considered when establishing your Page Ranking for various keywords.

Once crawled and rendered any given page is ready for Indexing, but an important sidenote on Rendering would be that even if any given page has been indexed – it does not by extension imply that all of its content made it into the index. So you might remain unaware that not all the page content is employed in building up your website or page rankings. This is, of course, unless you understand and test the rendering of the page.

Indexing is the process of adding information from crawled pages to a search index. The search index is what one searches when using a search engine. That’s why getting indexed in major search engines such as Google is so important for businesses. Users can’t find your businesses unless they’re in the index.

Crawling and Rendering together with the indexing rules specified on any given page will enable either the inclusion or exclusion of a page from the search engine index. If your pages are not successfully indexed, they will not get the chance to rank in search results, even if crawled and rendered perfectly.

At its core, it’s important to understand indexing in order to be able to make the distinction between an indexable and non-indexable website page, one that has been indeed indexed and one that hasn’t and if a page is indexable but not indexed – understand the root causes that prevent the indexing of the page by search engines.

Google also needs a way to shortlist and prioritize the 400 billion landing pages for all keywords from billions of its users worldwide to a more manageable number. This is where search engine algorithms come into play. Their sole purpose is providing the user a list of search results in the order it estimates to be most likely to solve the user’s search query.

Search engine algorithms are formulas that match the user’s keyword to relevant landing pages stored in the index in the form of search results. The search results are prioritized according to said search engine algorithm, with the result at the top being considered the single most relevant and useful for any one keyword in question.

No person knows every search engine ranking factor, not only because they vary across search engines but also because the search engines do not publicly disclose them. Nonetheless, search engines, including Google, have, in fact, disclosed to the public some of the key ranking factors as well as some best practices for SEO, which can prove quite useful to those with or without an SEO background.

Some of the key ranking factors are backlinks, content relevance and freshness, page loading speeds, and mobile-friendliness. It’s worth noting that users may see different results for the same keyword depending on their location, the language set on their browsers, and their search history.

Understanding the nuances of how search engines, primarily Google, rank pages for keywords and use them in its AI overview is what allows you to increase the visibility in organic search and by extension drive organic traffic through SEO. Understanding the multitude of factors that influence how a search engine orders results and the intricacies of each factor in isolation as well as in relation to other factors enables you to make informed judgment calls on various aspects of the website as a whole as well as individual landing pages in order to uplift them for target search queries and user intents in the SERPs.

Ultimately, the understanding of the search engine ranking factors, each contributing to the ordering of search results by the search engines is what allows the Search Engine Optimisation to take place. Mastering the principles of ranking allows you to position your content favorably against competitors and effectively connect with your target audience.

One of the primary advantages of SEO is that the organic traffic is free of charge. In other words, it can take a substantial investment of time and effort to get started and some patience to see a return on investment (ROI). However, once you start ranking, you’ll receive free traffic at no additional cost per click. Unlike paid advertising which is seen as a tap because you can switch the spending and subsequently the traffic on and off, SEO is a waterfall because it brings in new traffic consistently over the long term.

Another advantage is the sustainability of organic traffic. Once you start ranking through SEO, the rewards are often there to stay without the need for continuous spending and reinvestment. Building a sustainable stream of highly targeted organic traffic to your website could be the difference between your business surviving or seeing a downfall in times of economic uncertainties. In other words, while in the case of PPC, you may be forced to switch off the tap on ad spending, with SEO you may find yourself in a position where a decrease in spending won’t necessarily bring traffic drops.

Unlike more traditional channels SEO is Highly Targeted and has the capacity to target users in various stages of the decision-making funnel. Results served via organic search are inherently relevant to the search query that is entered by the user, allowing you to target potential customers looking for your products or services. SEO Managers can target different Search Intents by creating types of content that suit user needs determined by the keywords they are searching for at different stages in their decision-making cycle of buying a product or service.

SEO can also reinforce your brand-building and traditional advertising initiatives. You can use SEO to reinforce your brand at different stages in the decision-making cycle, and namely Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. You may also use SEO to reinforce your traditional marketing initiatives by encouraging users to search for your Brand, as opposed to asking them to visit a website.

SEO and Paid Search can have synergies, providing the perfect opportunity for sharing resources considering in both cases customers use keywords to find products or services on the same platform with organic and paid search results being listed side by side. As previously stated SEO requires time while Paid Search is instant, which is why it’s so important to align the strategies and the reporting of the two. When used together, PPC and SEO efforts can indirectly have an impact on each other as they may target the same market on the same platform.

Considering search engines’ algorithms have gotten so advanced and look to reward high-quality websites that provide a good user experience to their users, in modern SEO, your User Experience (UX) team and SEO Team should be more aligned than ever. Some of the UX factors that affect SEO are mobile optimisation, page loading speed, website security via SSL certification, lack of intrusive interstitials and website structure.

Given the importance of backlinks for SEO, Public relations (PR) can have a significant influence on the overall SEO performance. So much so that SEO Managers have designed an entirely new discipline called digital PR, a spin-off of traditional PR designed to focus on building backlinks and getting mentions from reputable sources on the web for the purpose of building website authority, relevance and trust.

The optimisation process starts with SEO Research in order to establish an understanding of the organic search market, users and technology implications within its wider SERP environment.

The insights gathered at the SEO research phase then fuel the practice of Onsite SEO which targets both content and technical areas for improvement on the website at hand.

Lastly, the Offsite SEO or Link Building efforts are directed towards establishing awareness, authority, relevance and trust within the industry at large with the purpose of reinforcing the efforts behind onsite optimisation at large.

Firstly, it depends on whether you’re working with a new or an established website. Generally speaking, since older websites have been around for longer, they tend to have a stronger backlink profile, more content, as well as already established rankings for keywords. As you would expect in this case you’re likely to see results in a relatively shorter amount of time. On the other hand, newer websites need more effort and resources to get off the ground, that come especially in the form of new content and backlinks. So if you’re working on a new website, it may take longer for SEO to show results.

Next is the competitive framework. If the keywords you’re targeting are highly competitive, it will take more effort and most importantly a longer time to outrank your competition.

Thirdly, it all depends on your internal and external resources. The more resources you can dedicate to SEO the faster your results will show. For instance, you could hire more content writers to create new content, allocate human resources to link building to build backlinks or invest in SEO tools to make your work easier, faster, and more efficient.

Lastly, it all depends on your SEO strategy because a nailed-down strategy on how you will tackle your target keywords can lead to a higher chance of climbing in organic SERPs. More specifically, if you have a strategy that targets a group of highly competitive keywords, you will find that no matter your efforts it may take years before you will be able to establish first-page organic rankings. While using alternative methods by targeting low volume and low competition keywords first may bring in results faster and reinforce your efforts for ranking for shorttail keywords in the long run.