How Does SEO Work? (Search Engine Optimization)
In this article, we want to return to the roots and explain the basics of SEO. Currently, there’s a lot of activity in the online marketing world regarding Google and the changes planned for the way we do search. This does not come as a surprise to the industry as search technology and the algorithm used continue to advance, however, one needs to understand how SEO worked in the past and how it’s working now, to determine and grasp how it should work in the future.
To understand how SEO works, one needs to first learn how a Google Search Query is executed. The below image is directly taken from the Google.com corporate site.
How Does SEO Work
As you can see, everything goes through the Google servers as Google finds the most relevant indexed content based on the search term (query) and then displays it to the user. Here’s the first step;
1) How do you get Google to index your site?
This is very simple. Regardless of the type of site (html, flash, CMS or PHP), you want Google to index your pages because that’s the only way you can be visible for a search query on Google. The best way to do this is submitting a sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Central. http://www.google.com/webmasters/ You can read a detailed article about “How to Create a Sitemap” here.
2) Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keyword Fields
”Page Title” being the most important factor, these 3 elements used to be the backbone of SEO in the late 90s, and they still have a lot of weight on the Google Algorithm. You can see the title of a page on top of a browser (IE or Firefox) as seen in the image below.
SEO Search Engine Optimization Title
The title on this page is “Internet Marketing Articles and Resources”. It defines what the contents of the page are about. Pay extra attention to the fact that the title does not begin with our company name “Optimum7”. A lot of websites and companies make this mistake of placing their names at the beginning of a page title on every single page on their sites. This is incorrect. The page title should begin with what that specific page is about. (The term or keyword you are targeting)
In the late 90s and early 2000s, if you only changed and optimized these elements on a website, it used to be enough. That’s not the case anymore, here’s the next most important factor.
3) Inbound Links (Backlinks)
These are “text links” from one website to another. Let’s assume that you have a really cool website about “NASCAR” and it’s about “NASCAR Events in Florida”. I happen to be a NASCAR fan and I want to link to your site from my site. There are a couple of ways I could do this;
a. “Click here for NASCAR Events in Florida.”
As you can see, this would be an “inbound link” to your site and an “outbound link” from my site. However, pay attention to the hyperlinked text (anchor text); it is “Click here”. However, your site is not about “Click Here”, it is about “NASCAR Events in Florida”. Therefore this would not be a quality backlink to your site.
b. “Click here for NASCAR Events in Florida.”
This example is the correct way for a backlink because the hyperlinked text “anchor text” is exactly what your website is about. So, this is a very “relevant” and “high quality” link.
Once Google attempts to index all the pages in your site, it looks at these elements for relevance;
• Title of Page
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords
• Number of Quality Inbound Links
• Quality of Websites Linking to you
• Relevancy of Inbound Links
While there are many more factors in Google algorithm, which define how SEO works, the above are considered to be the most important basic factors. However, things are changing in the Google world. We will speak about these changes in the upcoming articles.
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