Imagine a supermarket as a server and you as the owner. To make life easier for customers, you organize the groceries in a structured and well-organized manner: meat sections, toy sections, vegetable sections, etc. You get it.

SEO Rules

Apart from my own brands, I open up space for other producers to sell their products in my supermarket. Anyone can apply for the program, but the shelf space I have is limited and reserved only for those who meet the requirements I propose. There’s a system and a team that evaluates all these applications — curators. When an application passes the test, the system and the team check if that product is really worth being on the shelves or not.

Now, from a technical point of view, how does this test work? It’s called Pagerank and consists of the following: Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking.

Crawling — The system always looks for new content on the internet. If you have an article of ours and have submitted it for the system to locate through a sitemap, “in the case of Medium, this is done automatically; you don’t see this part because it’s already integrated.” The system will crawl this content. For a page to draw much attention, it needs to have links to other sites (backlinks), preferably the best ones in the niche.

Indexing — If the content is of real value, the system will index it. “In the case of the supermarket, this content goes to the shelves.”

Ranking — If it performs well, then the system, with the help of the curators, gives a score to that content and a prominent place. Here, it’s important for the content to be of high quality and to use the best hashtags.

Viral Content

There is content that goes viral, but if it’s not of high quality, it won’t pass the test and won’t stay on trend for long. That’s because this content didn’t pass the test and won’t be showcased on the shelves. Content that goes viral with ranking is what stays on the first page of Google.

Important Information: Each platform has its own SEO starter guide, but regardless of the guide, if your content is of high quality, you will achieve a good ranking. For Medium, because I couldn’t find an article that easily describes how SEO works on Medium, below is the link:

Medium SEO: A step-by-step guide for beginners

For Google, I don’t need to create it; they have an article that completely describes how everything works on Google, link:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide

The basis is almost the same, but each platform has its own guide and process to rank a page. Decide which platform to invest in and read the guide before starting to produce content.

I hope you’ve grasped the true meaning of SEO by applying these techniques. I hope your content goes viral and continues to be of high quality.