SYED CS HUB
Introduction to
Search Engine Optimization
Getting Started With SEO to Achieve Business Goals....
Search engine optimization (SEO)
refers to techniques that help your
website rank higher in organic (or
“natural”) search results, thus
making your website more visible
to people who are looking for your
product or service via search
engines.
SEO is part of the broader topic of
Search Engine Marketing (SEM),
a term used to describe all marketing strategies for search. SEM entails both
organic and paid search. With paid search, you can pay to list your website on a
search engine so that your website shows up when someone types in a specific
keyword or phrase. Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine,
but they are displayed in different locations on the page.
So, why is it important for your business‟ website to be listed on search engines?
On Google alone, there are over 694,000 searches conducted every second.i
Think about that. Every second that your website is not indexed on Google, you
are potentially missing out on hundreds, if not thousands of opportunities for
someone to visit your website, read your content, and potentially buy your
product or service.
Practicing SEO basics, as well as more advanced techniques
after those, can drastically improve your website‟s ability to rank in the search
engines and get found by your potential customers.
What about paid search? Yes, you can pay to have your website listed on the
search engines. However, running paid search campaigns can be quite costly if
you don‟t know what you‟re doing. Not to mention, about 88% of search engine
users never click on paid search ads anyway.ii
Because the sole purpose of a search engine is to provide you with relevant and
useful information, it is in everyone‟s best interest (for the search engine, the
searcher, and you) to ensure that your website is listed in the organic search
listings. In fact, it is probably best to stay away from paid search all together until
you feel you have a firm grasp on SEO and what it takes to rank organically.
Google Replaces the Phone Book
Outbound marketing as we know it is dead. It used to be that a majority of a local
company‟s marketing budget went to yellow pages, newspaper, and radio
advertisements. In order for you to get any business, you had to put your offers
and advertisements in your prospect‟s face. Well, not anymore. The age of the
Internet has made it so that consumers are now in control.
It has never been easier for consumers to tune out the plethora of
advertisements and commercials they hear each day. Since you can no longer
get their attention with outbound marketing, you have to switch your approach to
inbound marketing and make sure you‟re easy to find when consumers are
looking for you. When was the last time you used a phone book? Google is the
new phone book. If your website is not indexed and optimized to show for
keywords and phrases that are relevant to what you have to offer, all of that
potential traffic is going to your competitors.
How Search Engines Work ?
Search engines have one objective – to provide you with the most relevant
results possible in relation to your search query. If the search engine is
successful in providing you with information that meets your needs, then you are
a happy searcher. And happy searchers are more likely to come back to the
same search engine time and time again because they are getting the results
they need.
In order for a search engine to be able to display results when a user types in a
query, they need to have an archive of available information to choose from.
Every search engine has proprietary methods for gathering and prioritizing
website content. Regardless of the specific tactics or methods used, this process
is called indexing. Search engines actually attempt to scan the entire online
universe and index all the information so they can show it to you when you enter
a search query.
How do they do it? Every search engine has what are referred to as bots, or
crawlers, that constantly scan the web, indexing websites for content and
following links on each webpage to other webpages. If your website has not been
indexed, it is impossible for your website to appear in the search results. Unless
you are running a shady online business or trying to cheat your way to the top of
the search engine results page (SERP), chances are your website has already
been indexed.
So, big search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are constantly indexing
hundreds of millions, if not billions, of webpages. How do they know what to
show on the SERP when you enter a search query? The search engines
consider two main areas when determining what your website is about and how
to prioritize it.
1. Content on your website:
When indexing pages, the search engine bots
scan each page of your website, looking for clues about what topics your
website covers and scanning your website‟s back-end code for certain
tags, descriptions, and instructions.
2. Who’s linking to you:
As the search engine bots scan webpages for
indexing, they also look for links from other websites. The more inbound
links a website has, the more influence or authority it has. Essentially,
every inbound link counts as a vote for that website‟s content. Also, each inbound link holds different weight. For instance, a link from a highly
authoritative website like The New York Times (nytimes.com) will give a
website a bigger boost than a link from a small blog site. This boost is
sometimes referred to as link juice.
When a search query is entered, the search engine looks in its index for the most
relevant information and displays the results on the SERP. The results are then
listed in order of most relevant and authoritative.
If you conduct the same search on different search engines, chances are you will
see different results on the SERP. This is because each search engine uses a
proprietary algorithm that considers multiple factors in order to determine what
results to show in the SERP when a search query is entered.
A few factors that a search engine algorithm may consider when deciding what
information to show in the SERP include:
- Geographic location of the searcher
- Historical performance of a listing (clicks, bounce rates, etc.)
- Link quality (reciprocal vs. one-way)
- Webpage content (keywords, tags, pictures)
- Back end code or HTML of webpage
- Link type (social media sharing, link from media outlet, blog, etc.)
With a 200B market capiii, Google dominates the search engine market. Google
became the leader by fundamentally revolutionizing the way search engines work
and giving searchers better results with their advanced algorithm. With 64%
market share, according to Compete, Inc., Google is still viewed as the primary
innovator and master in the space.
Before the days of Google (circa 1997), search engines relied solely on indexing
web page content and considering factors like keyword density in order to
determine what results to put at the top of the SERP. This approach gave way to
what are referred to as black-hat SEO tactics, as website engineers began
intentionally stuffing their webpages with keywords so they would rank at the top
of the search engines, even if their webpages were completely irrelevant to the
search result.
What it Takes to Rank
It is not difficult to get your website to index and even rank on the search
engines. However, getting your website to rank for specific keywords can be
tricky.
There are essentially 3 elements that a search engine considers when
determining where to list a website on the SERP: rank, authority, and relevance.
- Rank :- Rank is the position that your website physically falls in on the SERP when
a specific search query is entered. If you are the first website in the
organic section of the SERP (don‟t be confused by the paid ads at the very
top), then your rank is 1. If your website is in the second position, your rank
is 2, and so on. As discussed previously in How Search Engines Work,
your rank is an indicator of how relevant and authoritative your website is
in the eyes of the search engine, as it relates to the search query entered.
Tracking how your website ranks for a specific keyword over time is a good
way to determine if your SEO techniques are having an impact. However,
since there are so many other factors beyond your control when it comes
to ranking, do not obsess over it. If your website jumps 1-5 spots from time
to time, that‟s to be expected. It‟s when you jump 10, 20, 30 spots up in the
rankings that it makes sense to pat yourself on the back.
- Authority:- As previously discussed in the How Search Engines Work section, search
engines determine how authoritative and credible a website‟s content is by
calculating how many inbound links (links from other websites) it has.
However, the number of inbound links does not necessarily correlate with
higher rankings. The search engines also look at how authoritative the
websites that link to you are, what anchor text is used to link to your
website, and other factors such as the age of your domain.
You can track over time how authoritative your website is by monitoring a
few different metrics. There are a variety of tools to help you keep track.
HubSpot offers a free tool called Website Grader that will show you how
many domains are linking to your website, and also provide your website‟s Moz rank. MozRank is SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point
measure of global link authority or popularity. It is very similar in purpose to
the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g.,
Google's PageRank).
- Relevance:-Relevance is a one of the most critical factors of SEO. The search engines
are not only looking to see that you are using certain keywords, but they
are also looking for clues to determine how relevant your content is to a
specific search query. Besides actual text on your webpages, the search
engines will review your website‟s structure, use of keywords in your
URLs, page formatting (such as bolded text), and what keywords are in the
headline of the webpage versus those in the body text.
While there is no way to track how relevant your website is, there are some
SEO basics you can practice to cover your bases and make sure you are
giving the search engines every possible opportunity to consider your
website. We‟ll get to that in just a bit.
Search engines are extremely complex. Bottom line: the search engines are
trying to think like human beings. It is very easy to get caught up in modifying
your website‟s content just so you rank on the search engines. When in doubt,
always err on the side of providing relevant and coherent content that your
website‟s audience (your prospects) can digest. If you find yourself doing
something solely for the search engines, you should take a moment to ask
yourself why.
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