What is SEO and how does it work? This is the question I will answer today. So if you’re tired of getting confused with watered down explanations or high tech babble pull up a chair and be prepared to get schooled in the simple terms of Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization and can sound a bit technical but with a simple and clear explanation you’ll be talking tech in no time. SEO helps to promote sites and it is for this reason it’s vital to understand if you intend to make money online. The promotion process is more of a selection process, SEO determines if you meet the search criteria for items being looked for by your everyday common Internet user.
Search engines provide the people looking for products and services online with results. You want your information to be pulled from the pile of other sites and pages and offered to the person seeking information. The way you achieve this is by making your page or site relevant to what people are looking for.
SEO is a process by which you make your web pages more search engine friendly in order to get the much desired higher page position. A basic fact of SEO is plain and simple, you must follow the rules to get top ratings and compete with the masses. While this helps you build traffic to your sites or pages it’s not a form of advertising. SEO is the head coach or boss of all things online.
This coach or boss makes sure everyone follows the rules or they don't get picked to play. You don't want to be left setting the bench, ideally you want to get in the game!
Simple Fact
Your guideline for good rankings is to be certain your site or page is relevant to the search term. You've got to get yourself in front of the traffic to make money. If you really want to be in this spot you must devote time and attention to SEO details. To move forward you must understand how search engines work.
What to Know about Search Engines
· They are not humans
· They are text driven
· They crawl (search) the web for content or text
· They index, process, calculate relevancy and retrieve
· They look for particular items, mostly text to learn what your site is about
Crawl – as spiders and or bots crawl the web they go about checking out the content. This is done by software called a crawler or spider, or in Google’s case a Googlebot.
They follow links from one page to the next and index the findings. This takes a lot of time given there are around 20 billion or so sites to collect data from. It is for this reason you must be quiet and wait. The number one complaint I hear is why haven’t I made money yet?
Think about the masses out there trying to do exactly what you’re doing. Patience is a virtue; remember spiders view mostly text, not photos, videos, or product images.
Content or text is KING in terms of spiders and your ranking. So the only thing that really counts to the spiders is written content and it better be good.
Note: You do however want your site to be pleasing when the humans arrive. This is why you make it eye catching adding photo's and videos. Do give photos a title or description to help the bots understand what the image is. This step will make images relevant to the spiders and bots.
Index – The next step is to index.
Once the page is indexed it is stored in a huge database, it is kept there for later reference.
This identifies the words and expressions that best describe what the site or page is about in order to assign it to particular keywords.
It is for this reason you should be very careful to optimize the page right so it’s put in the right category.
The spiders aren’t humans and don’t always get it right in terms of your intentions. The work of spiders is done by the content you provide. This is why proper optimization is a must.
When a search request comes in the search engines process it, compare it to the indexed pages in the database determining which information to pull by calculating the relevancy of each page per the request made. That my friend is how you get picked!
Algorithms – Algorithms calculate relevancy with several different types. The different algorithms have a different common factor it looks for such as metatags, links, and keyword density.
This is the reason different search engines have different results for your pages. All major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc. change their algorithms from time to time.
In order to stay on top of the search results you must also adapt your sites and pages to the updates and changes. Simply do this by updating, editing and staying current with news feeds etc.
Retrieving – Last but not least comes retrieving the results. This is a process of placing your page in the browser in order of most relevant to least relevant.
You want to be identified as the most relevant landing yourself an audience with the interested consumer. I'm confident you now understand What SEO is in Simple Terms.
Much Love and Success, Katie
The author of this publication, Katie McMurray owns the copyright to What SEO is in Simple Terms. The rights to publish this article in print or online can only be granted by contacting me the author in writing. You may use the intro and link back to this article directing the reader back to my post here at WroteItDown where they may find the story in its entirety.
