What really is search engine optimization? Frequently, website owners ask that. The sound of it is too important to ignore, but many people are confused and don’t know where to start in optimizing their site for searches. Search engine optimization includes two actions. Firstly, a website should be configured so that Google or any other search engines can successfully index the page. Secondly, you have to ensure that when someone Googles your products or brands that your page ranks high among the rest in the search results. To understand how to optimize a website begin with understanding how both Google and Bing work so that you would know where to start optimizing your site.
What is SEO?
Search is still a relatively new phenomenon, after all Google is only a teenager in terms of how long it’s been around. The best way to think about search is to think of Google and Bing as Internet librarians. They take in ridiculous amounts of data from websites all over the world, put it in an index and when someone comes to their website with a query like “Who won best picture in 1948?” they search their index to find an appropriate reference and then serve up those answers to the user on their web page.
But how did they actually get that data and how did Google know that Hamlet won best picture in 1948?
Well it all starts with one website which leads to another and another… What Google and Bing do all day long, 365 days a year is crawl the Internet and they do that with a program called Spiders. Spiders start on websites they deem as highly valued, like CNN.com or the New York Times and they click on every link on both CNN and the New York Times which leads them to other web sites where they again click on every link that leads them to more websites so after awhilethey start to map out most of the webpages on the Internet.
When the Google spiders come across something new, they put that web page into its index for future reference and there it sits in the Google data ware house until someone comes to Google.com and starts a search.
One basic tenet of SEO is to try and understand how people search on Google and Bing so you can craft strategies on those search patterns. The first thing to understand about how people search is that people search with intent. They are looking for something. The intent people search with can be categorized into the following:
Each of these intents leads to different kinds of search categories.
People will typically fall into the following kinds of searches:
Navigational Searches: They are looking for a specific website but they don’t remember the exact URL.
Informational Searches: This is Google’s bread and butter. Stuff like What is the weather in Charlotte NC? and Who won best actor in 1964? People will usually tend to form these searches in the form of a question and the goal is finding the information itself
Commercial Investigation: People working at businesses will be given tasks by their supervisors. Things like, hey we need a website built or can you find a good landscaper in San Diego. These are the modern day equivalents of looking in the Yellow Pages. Rather than turning to the yellow pages, they turn to Google to find reputable businesses to contact. These may or may not lead to commerce or leads, but presents an opportunity for both, same as someone seeing your ad in the Yellow Pages
Looking for a Purchase: People will search the Internet when they are ready to buy. This will typically spike around specific holidays as people look for very specific gifts for ideas for gifts. Things like best father’s day gifts When someone Googles, who won best picture in 1948, Google goes into it’s index and pulls out every webpage that mentions best picture in 1948. It then applies its secret sauce, the Google algorithm, and ranks those pages from 1 – infinity and serves them up to the user and it does this very quickly. My search took 0.28 seconds.
The algorithm that Google applies is a very complicated mathematical formula and asks over 200 questions to make sure it’s giving users the right responses. One of the most important questions it asks is “what’s on this page that’s relevant to this query?” and that leads us to keywords
What is a Keyword?
First off, a keyword is not just a word, it can also be a phrase. This keyword or combination of keywords are what people enter into Google, Bing, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or other sites to find stuff. They can exist in the form of a question such as what is a keyword? They can
be simple phrases such as john cash man princetonnj or they can be very long phrases looking for specific information such as address digital firefly marketing princetonnj.
All of these phrases are considered keywords. But what separates one keyword from another? Are there good keywords
and bad keywords? The answer is there aren’t good and bad keywords, but there are competitive and non-competitive keywords that will help you start to understand the best way to get Google to get traffic to your website
Long Tail Keywords: Competitive and non competitive words and phrases. Google estimates that over 20% of its searches are brand new, meaning no one has ever searched for that phrase before. This leads us into what’s called the long tail of keywords and its a graph that looks like this On the high end are very competitive keywords like “coffee” or “jewelry” these keywords are going to be ranked by very large companies and websites. The words receive billions of searches every month. As phrases become more pointed, the competition, on average,
decreases as does the amount of search traffic, so it becomes easier for smaller websites to begin to show up in Google results for either search traffic that does not exist yet or for some very pointed search results. Therefore, over time if you have lots of web pages with
unique and highly targeted keywords, that will end up being worth more in traffic than ranking for just one highly competitive keyword.
How does SEO work?
Keyword Research: This is the foundation of SEO. This involves identifying specific words and phrases (keywords) that allow potential customers to search for products, services, or information about your business
On-page optimization: This means optimizing various features on your website to make it search engine friendly. The main features are:
Content: High-quality, relevant content that includes targeted keywords naturally.
Title Tags and Meta Description: Write a strong title and description for each page with relevant keywords.
URL Structure : Creates clean and descriptive URLs.
Internal links: Links to related pages within your site.
Image Alt Text: Optimize images with descriptive text.
Behind-the-scenes optimization: This involves activities that are done behind the scenes of your website to improve its ranking. The most important aspect of SEO after all is building backlinks (your links from other websites). High-quality backlinks from an official site can greatly increase the authority and ranking of your site.
Technical SEO: This aspect focuses on the technical aspects of your website, e.g.
Site Speed: To ensure your site loads fast.
Mobile Friendly: Optimize your website for mobile devices.
Indexing : Make sure search engines can crawl and index your site properly.
Structured data: Using schema markup to help search engines understand your content.
User Experience (UX): Search engines like Google consider user experience indicators such as bounce rate, time spent on the site, and page views. A well-designed and accessible website with valuable content comes first.
Algorithm updates: Google and other search engines frequently update their algorithms to make search results more relevant and better. s
Conclusion: Search Engine Optimization can be a difficult subject to under
stand. We have only scratched the surface in this eBook but we hope it gives you an idea of how SEO works and how you can figure out some of the mysteries of SEO on your own.
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