Helping you market your business online | How does SEO Work?

Adam WestonOnline Marketing, Social Media, Website Design

When you generate a search on major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) you receive results that are relevant to the search you performed. Let’s take Google for example. They tend to list things in the order that they think is the most popular, appropriate, and most relevant. How? Glad you asked!

The first thing search engines do to find pages on the web (btw, there are hundreds of billions of pages of websites aka as URL’s loaded with content) is write software applications that use automated programs which are called, “Bots” that crawl the web to look for all the pages a website links to. The bots then use those links to discover all the pages on the web. After they crawl the web an index of the documents are built. The documents are stored by the words and phrases that appear on them or that they (search engines) think are relevant. This makes searching for items and/or  information, on the web, really fast. Easy right? Phew! Now that we have your attention…

Once the indexes are created they calculate Query Independent Metrics. The search engines know that pages have attributes that are important in relation to the keywords that you’re searching for but they also have important attributes like popularity, who links to them, and what is being said about them. This is what drives page rankings.

The Search engines generally look at these elements of your site for relevance:

  • Title of Page
  • Meta Keywords
  • Meta Description
  • Number of Top Rated Inbound Links
  • Ranking of Websites Linking to you
  • Relevancy of Inbound Links

While there are many more factors in a search engines algorithm, that actually define how Search Engine Optimization works, the elements above are considered to be the most important basic factors….Well, that is currently! The way Search Engines look at your site and rank your site are changing continuously in an effort to find the most relevant information for those searching.

How can SEO help your business?  Follow the link, it always knows…WEB DESIGN WITH SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION | SEO

image source: Daniel Wambugu