Plain and simple, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making improvements on and
off your website in order to gain more exposure in search engine results. And more exposure
in search engine results will ultimately lead to more visitors finding you for the right
reasons and going to your website. In order to understand what improvements will affect
search engine results, let's take a step back and understand the goal of the search engines
themselves. At the heart of it all, search engines are just trying to find and understand
all the content out there on the Internet, and then quickly deliver relevant and authoritative
results based on any phrase that a user might be searching for. First, let's talk about
relevance. When a user searches for something like California hotels, search engines want
to show a list of results that are relevant to the topic of California hotels. Search
engines will analyze all of the web pages that they've ever visited and pick out the
pages that they believe are the most relevant to California hotels. They determine this
by evaluating lots of different factors, including how your content is written and implemented
in code, as well as how other websites around the Internet are linking to you. And all of
this stuffed into a very big, very complex, and very proprietary algorithm. At the end
of the day, and in a fraction of a second, a search engine is then able to rank and display
all of those web pages in order of relevance to that phrase that the user just typed in,
California Hotels. This is very important to understand, because search engines make
a very clear distinction between content that's about California Hotels versus content relevant
for other phrases, like California resorts, or a phrase like beach getaway. Search engines
are able to understand quite a bit about semantic and thematic connections between words and
concepts. Take another example: dog crates. A search engine knows that pages selling dog
crates are extremely relevant to that search query, but it also knows that websites about
pet carriers are also very relevant. It also knows that a website promoting things like
pet food and dog toys might also be relevant to that search query, but perhaps less so.
The other factor that influences search engine exposure is Authority. In other words, out
there on the largely lawless World Wide Web, where anyone can post anything, is your website
a trusted place on the Internet that the search engines would want to show to their users?
One very common way that search engines determine the authority of a web page or a domain is
by evaluating what other websites think of you, and this can be measured through the
links out there that are pointing to your website. You can think of a link as a vote
on the Internet. A web page linking to your website is almost like saying, hey, I trust
your content enough that I am wiling to reference your page and possibly even send traffic to
your site. It's a vote of trust, and the search engines pick up on this as they scour the
web reading, evaluating, and storing all the data that they can find on all the pages of
the Internet. But it's important to know right from the start that this not just a popularity
contest where you try to accumulate the most votes on the Internet. Search engines have
safeguards in place to prevent this kind of abuse, and instead place an emphasis on the
quality of a link. For example, a search engine is more likely to trust a link if it comes
from a well respected or industry-related site, like an industry leading blog or a nonprofit
or government agency that's involved in your field of work. A link coming from a one month-old
site that has nothing to do with you or your industry, right above some text that says
"I'll link to anything you want for five dollars" is not going to be valued nearly as much.
From the search engines' perspective, some links are more effective than others in casting
their vote to your website and determining your site's authority. So you might think
of this whole system as a weighted democracy where some votes are worth more than others.
Understanding how important both relevance and authority are to a search engine, will
help us to both understand and improve these factors, and will ultimately lead to better