- Search engine optimization is all about
impacting how visible your website is
in a search engine's organic results.
And you'll be making changes to your site's technical setup,
as well as the content on the page
in an effort to improve rank.
You'll also explore offsite factors,
such as sites that link to yours
and how they've chosen to structure those links,
plus, you'll want to measure your performance
and review your competition.
If you're just getting your feet wet with SEO,
it's important that you know how a search engine works.
So at a high level, a company like Google
will have a bot, basically a software program
that crawls the web.
It does this by following links,
links from your site to other pages on your site,
and links from one site to another.
The crawler arrives at a page, reads the code,
and then stores that information.
That stored information is called the index.
And your initial goal is to be indexed by Google.
If your indexed, you'll rank and you might not rank well,
but you have the potential for ranking.
And when I talk about rank,
I'm referring to which position you appear in
for a particular search query.
So when you enter a search term,
Google will do its best to provide the most important
and relevant answers, and then rank them
from what it sees as best to worst.
The better Google is at their job,
the more likely you are to use them and, well,
the more money they make.
So it's in Google's best interest
to deliver the best content.
And because Google drives a mind-boggling
amount of traffic each day, it's in your best interest
to rank well for relevant terms.
Rank is roughly determined by importance,
quality, and relevance.
A complex algorithm is going to churn
through hundreds of variables to decide
where your page lands and many of those variables
are what you'll be aiming to optimize.
Say those variables might include what articles you publish,
what sites link back to your page,
how your website is programmed,
and even if your web experience is mobile friendly.
Google even evaluates the quality of the pages
that are linking to you.
If they're on brand, relevant, and popular,
it's going to assume that you're more credible
than if it's off-topic, unpopular pages
that are linking to your content.
Now, variables that you can't control
might include where a user is searching from,
trending topics and any current events
that could skew your results,
plus. whatever your competition is up to.
Now, SEO done well can provide an impressive ROI,
but done poorly, and it'll negatively impact
your organic search efforts.