How Does SEO Work?
Since the Internet has become a hub for information, online visibility has never been more crucial for business owners. But understanding how you can create that online visibility can be confusing; especially if you don't fully understand how SEO works or the fundamentals of how search engines work. In this post I'll explain how search engines get their data and what you can do to maximize your online visibility organically.
Understanding Major Search Engines
When you type a key phrase in a search engine (like Google) to locate information, you're actually searching through the index of that particular search engine —you're not actually searching the Web. You're actually looking through Google's index of websites.
The best URL's/websites displayed in the organic search engine results are ranked in order of relevance, with the "best results" shown first, in the center of the page. The paid search engine results are usually featured in the right hand side of the screen or sometimes in the top placement areas. When trying to understand search engines, it helpful to think of them as Librarians.
How Does SEO Work?
Stay in the Librarian mind-set. Let's say you wanted to find a book about "marketing". When you asked the Librarian for help, she'd probably start by looking for titles with the word "marketing" in them. Search engines utilize a similar methodology. The search engines consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how to prioritize it.
- Content on your website
- Other websites linking to you or content outside of your website
Website Content
Search engines scan each page of your website, in search of clues about what topics your website covers. They scan your website‟s back-end code for certain indicators like descriptions, and page title containing the specified keyword and other terms associated. They'll also look for the frequency of those keywords in your content, links, headlines and other key areas of your website.
Other Website Content
As the search engine spiders scan web pages for indexing, they also looking for links that point to you from other websites. These are called inbound links and are one of the off-page factors used to determine rank. The more inbound links your website has (from trustworthy sources), the more influence or authority it has. Online review sites, online testimonials and news focused websites are all examples of trustworthy websites. These off-page factors heavily influence your rankings because webmasters cannot easily control the results. It's the search engines way of preventing you from "cheating" or swaying results.
Other SEO factors considered when ranking websites include:
- Geographic location of the person searching
- Click-through measurement (If you rank well for a keyword or search term but rarely get clicked or people bounce, your rankings/placement could be affected)
- Link quality (trustworthy sites, reciprocal vs. one-way, etc.)
- Coding or HTML elements of a web page
How You Can get Better Website Rankings with SEO
With a better understanding of how search engines work, you'll be able to make better decisions about your online marketing efforts. Sometimes the best process for achieving rankings is focused more on common-sense elements or relating the process to something similar, like our Librarian example.
I always tell clients to think about these three key points when optimizing your website:
- Remember that search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are in business too. Their job is to deliver the most relevant results to the end user. If they don't do their job properly (show relevant results) their "business" quickly loses credibility and they are unable to sell advertising (out of business). Therefore, take note of what's important but be sure to follow the search engine guidelines to prevent being blacklisted from the search engine(s).
- Great marketing is all about understanding your prospect and what they want. This even applies to online marketing. Before you attempt to utilize SEO tactics to optimize anything, create a new web page or write any content ask yourself, "Would my prospect find this content/information valuable". Don't create pages or content for the purposes of SEO. Create valuable information for your prospect and you'll be one step closer to maximizing your online visibility.
- Once you have great content written for your prospects, distribute that content online. Remember the online world is much bigger than YOUR website so in order to attract the attention of the search engines, you'll need to create quality inbound links to that content. An easy way to get started on this is to post links to your content on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. If others find it valuable they'll share it too, creating those inbound links.
As you already know, the search engines are smart. Utilize their guidelines, speak to your audience and start optimizing.