Many people assume that the terms Internet and the World Wide Web can be used interchangeably. However, that isn’t true. The Internet and the World Wide Web are both two separate technologies.
In fact, the World Wide Web is only one aspect of the Internet, which is a global network. The Web is made up of billions of digital documents which are accessible in any web browser of your choice.
In this article, we’ll go into further differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web, and why it matters.
While you may not think that the differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web matter, for marketers and SEO analysts, it matters a great deal.
In the world of Search Engine Optimization, understanding the differences between the Internet and the Web can help get your content recognized on search engines and make you more easily discovered.
While you need the Internet to access the World Wide Web, you don’t need the World Wide Web to access the internet.
A Brief Understanding of SEO
Before we go further into the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, you should know a little bit more about SEO.
Briefly, we explained that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s a tool that is heavily utilized when dabbling with search engines.
SEO is used to detect your website through search engines. There are distinct practices and strategies that can be used to help your website stand out in search engine results.
This article will help you comprehend the differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web to help you better understand how SEO works for you.
See, search engines are only utilized on the World Wide Web, and they gather information about other websites to present information to the querying users.
Search engines take the query they’re given and match a list of results that answer their queries. These are the results pages.
There are a number of search engines available in the world today, and the most popular among them is Google, and YouTube. While you may think that YouTube is used for video streaming, SEO is used to find specific videos for a target audience.
Search engines utilize keywords to help find queries, as they don’t understand grammar rules in the same way as a human. Instead, you need to ensure that you specifically mention the keyword.
Therefore, you need to use keyword research to identify opportunities that you can rank for. They also utilize link building to help your website perform better in organic searches.
The Internet VS The internet
Depending on the part of the internet you’re referring to, you may wonder whether you need to capitalize the Internet.
Most grammar rulebooks don’t stress the need for capitalization, but when referring to the Internet as a whole, it can be useful to capitalize it to understand that you’re discussing the entire network.
However, the internet can be used when you’re discussing it as if it’s the web.
The Internet was first a concept used by the US Department of Defense that was explored by ARPA, otherwise referred to as the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This occurred all the way back in the 1960s and has since been developed further to create the largest network of shared information in the world.
Originally, it was just a small network between a pair of computers at MIT, but this changed to become available on numerous campuses.
What few people understand is that the Internet has been around far longer than the World Wide Web, which was designed to make sharing information between everyone more accessible to the population.
By capitalizing the Internet, you are able to identify the historical connotations and help separate it from the modern internet which is associated with the World Wide Web.
However, as a general grammar rule, the internet itself doesn’t need any capitalization in the majority of contexts.
What is the Internet?
The Internet is a massive public network of other networks and connects a maze of hardwire and wireless connections between drivers and billions of devices all around the world.
When thinking of the Internet, it’s best to think of it as a global computer with many little computers taking the role of a server. Even when one user logs off, it doesn’t mean the rest of the system has to, the global network remains unscathed.
The information on a single computer is transmitted to another, regardless of the physical distance in between. There are a variety of different internets available online, with many businesses and educational institutes having an intranet.
The intranet is a privatized computer framework to allow for access to the members of that specific business, or a student of that institution.
Even when you use data on your cell phone, or when you’re playing a video game online with other gamers, you’re using the Internet to send and receive that information.
So the Internet is not limited to only computers, but to smartphones, games consoles, tablets, and many more devices.
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web which is also casually referred to as the Web is a system that’s used to access and navigate the Internet.
For many people, the Web is the standard method of browsing the Internet, and there are other alternatives available, but this one is the most popularly used.
The Web uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which you’ll recognize as the HTTP code at the beginning of all URLs once they are accessed.
The primary language of the Web is HTML or HyperText Markup Language, which uses HTTP as the grammar rule behind it.
Language helps us all communicate, and HTML being the standardized language of the Web ensures that all sites can communicate with each other.
HTML files are used by the Web to make sense of the pages that are displayed on a browser, which is the only way you can access the Web. However, you don’t always need a screen to connect to the Internet, which doesn’t require HTTP or HTML to work.
The Web was first accessed in 1991, but it was established by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. However, the Internet has been around since the 1960s.
Understanding the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet can play a huge role in understanding search engines and SEO.
Search Engines
An essential feature of HTML is the utilization of hyperlinks. Numerous websites utilize links to share information with one another and travel between each page.
You can think of links as the architecture of the Web, as you need these to navigate the Web and explore your browser.
If you have a basic understanding of SEO, you should know that links are vital in ensuring the ranking of your website as it appears on search engines.
Links are critical to gaining visibility in SERPs, or, in layman’s terms, Search Engine Results Pages. If you want to appear in SERPs, you need to establish a way to build links to both your content and your website.
SERPs are essentially pages filled with links, and some SEO analysts and marketers have argued whether links are still relevant in this day and age. However, Google is a web-based search engine, so links will always be relevant to the ranking of SERPs.
However, it’s not only links that establish your website’s ranking. You need to consider any meaningful keywords, the search intern, the optimization, and the proper use of English grammar.
These are all factors that need to be kept in mind, alongside links which are the glue that holds the Web together.
By using link-building services as a part of your SEO strategy, you can help your content become discovered through search engines, and indexed on the right page.
The Web VS The Internet
The Internet can be accessed through so many devices, from games to music streaming. However, the Web needs links to ensure it works.
While applications may have HTML code and other links in their backend, it doesn’t mean that they link to other web pages. Their links are used to connect one another to the internal machinations of the app.
Content can be accessed either through the Web or in the form of applications. You can identify this by looking at social media apps and news apps.
All of these have their own web pages, but they still have an app designed to make their content more accessible to their audiences. However, even if they post the same content, it’s not exactly the same.
If you publish content on an application, it doesn’t mean that it can be found on SERPs. It can’t even be found on a browser unless it’s already been published on the Web.
Instead, the app uses its own mini-network to make the content more accessible within the app. However, on a web page, you want to ensure that you can have it discovered by everyone and not just the users.
Apps themselves don’t rely on HTML but instead are made up of different coding languages to ensure that they work.
Due to the differences between how the Internet and the Web work, understanding the differences can help you understand the benefits of SEO and link building.
It is through the use of search engines that people ask questions and search for specific sites to get their information, and they can’t just get them from an app.
By answering questions and using links, you can make your content reach a larger audience than you would expect if you only have an app available on the Internet.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, with the help of this article, you have a better understanding of the differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Understanding the differences between them can help your Search Engine Optimization results, and help your page appear with a higher rank on Search Engine Result Pages.
By understanding how to utilize both the Internet and the World Wide Web, you’ll be able to see that while you can use them as interchangeable terms, they are not actually the same.
When discussing the internet, most people will assume you are talking about the web, but when you are using the internet for marketing, you should refer to the World Wide Web as search engines are all web-based.
While the Internet is used, and you need to be connected to it to utilize web-based marketing, it is through the Web that links are built.
If you want your content to appear on SERPs, you should make sure that you understand how the Web works and how SEO utilizes links to appear with a high ranking in SERPs.
Hi, my name is Justin Shaw, I started my career with a Masters in Computer Science but found writing to be my forte'.
I'm now the Principal Tech writer for GshiftLabs.com as well as a few other well known publications. I help make the complex world of Tech-Jargon easy to understand.
