For boosting your site’s rankings on search engines, it is important to have a ba‐sic understanding of how search engines work.

Search engines do not perform live or real‐time searches of the web. Instead, they search through their own database which contains ‘snapshots’ of millions, even billions of web pages. An engine attempts to copy and arrange all the in‐formation on the web into its database, and when you enter a search query, it searches through the database and returns results based on an algorithm, with each result pointing to the URL of the webpage.

This search process occurs in three stages: crawling, indexing and retrieving.

1) Crawling: The engine’s robotic crawlers, also known as spiders, go over each available web page and make a partial or full copy (also known as caching) of it. Spiders travel from page to page via the links on a page.

2) Indexing: The engine removes or devalues duplicate pages, removes ‘spam’ pages, and then catalogues and indexes each page according to the content of the page, which includes both text and markup (code).

3) Retrieving: Once a page is indexed, it is available for retrieval in search re‐sults. A retrieval algorithm determines the results and their order; each en‐gine has its own algorithm, which is why results vary from engine to engine.

Performing a search

Let us use Google to perform a quick search for “used books”. In 0.2 seconds, the first SERP is generated, featuring the top ten of about 200 million results related to the query. Google now also features ‘web options’, enabling you to narrow your results down in a number of ways. Each result also has a link to its cached copy on Google, and a link to a list of similar results.

Before these results are generated, Google’s spiders have already accessed and cached all these pages into its database and organized them. Each page is parsed and stored in Google’s database as a collection of words, which are used to de‐termine what the page is about. Each page also has its own information, such as its age, type (news, forums, shopping etc), popularity and authority.

When you search for “used books”, Google searches through its own database to look for:

pages that contain the exact phrase “used books”,

• pages where the words “used” and “books” appear close together, 7
• pages that contain both words, though not necessarily close together,
• pages that contain other variations of both words, such as “use” and “book”
• pages that are linked by other pages with “used books” in the link text, and
• pages that are linked by other pages with “used’ and “books” in the link text.

One or more of these criteria are satisfied by over 200 million web pages in Google’s massive database.

Ranking Factors

The order in which these millions of results are returned depends on their rela‐tive relevance to your query. In short, Google aims to return the most relevant results first, and the least relevant last. The calculation of this relevance is of ut‐most importance to web site developers and optimizers.

In order to determine a page’s rank for a specific query, two main criteria are used by all major search engines:
1. Keyword relevance: how central is the search term to the theme or meaning of the content on the page?
2. Page trust: how popular and trusted is the page on which the term appears?

These criteria are further broken down into over 200 individual factors, and search engines conceal their exact algorithms from users and webmasters in or‐der to avoid manipulation and spamming.

Keyword Relevance

Keyword relevance depends heavily on on‐page factors. In addition to the raw text or body of the page, search engines use a number of criteria to understand what the page is about:

• the title of the page: does the keyword appear in the title of the page?
• the prominence and placement of keywords on the page: is the keyword em‐phasized on the page – by being used in headings, bold text, italicized text, link text, bulleted lists or larger text?
• the meta description of the page: does the ‘description’ meta tag in the page’s markup contain the keywords?
• keyword density: does the keyword appear a number of times?
• anchor text (link text): do inbound links to the page contain the keyword?

A page where “used books” appears once or twice in the body of the page will be considered less relevant than a page where it appears in content headings, which will be less relevant than a page titled “used books” which also uses it in the meta description and main body of the page.
 

Page Trust

If rankings depended only, or even heavily, on on‐page factors, it would be quite easy to manipulate search engines. Since search engines don’t have a human understanding of meaning, it would be easy to create spam pages where key‐words appear in the right places (title, headings, bold text etc). Just a few years ago, it was not uncommon for a top result in Google to be an irrelevant page, where keywords were either hidden or used without relevant meaning.

In order to lower the ranking of such low‐quality results, off‐page factors have gained a great deal of importance in search rankings. In short, search engines now put a lot of weight on what other pages or websites think of a page.

Since spiders (and humans) navigate the web through links, search engines use linking as a way to determine the reliability of the linked page. By linking to an‐other page, a web page leads humans and spiders to it, so a backlink (inbound link to a page) may be considered a vote of confidence for the page, and the words which appear in the link text are used in determining what the linked page is about.

A page’s reliability or trust depends on a number of factors:

The authority of the domain: how reliable and trusted is the main domain? A page on Wikipedia, for example, is much more reliable than a page on a new or low‐traffic website. Domain authority is determined by a number of fac‐tors, including age, traffic and link popularity.

Number of backlinks: how many pages are linking to this page, and from how many different sources (domains)?

The authority of the linking page: how important is the page from which it is linked? A link from a high authority website (such as .edu or .gov sites) is more valuable than a link from an unreliable source such as a blog.

Google has its own method, known as PageRank™, of evaluating the backlinks to a page. Each indexed page is assigned a weighted number between 1 and 10 which signifies its link popularity. You can check the PageRank of a page here or by installing the Google toolbar. Note that PageRank is updated every few months and can sometimes vary unpredictably. So should not be relied upon.

For millions of reasons, but they can all be classi‐fied into three main types:

1) Informational search: people looking for information online, such as “who directed Gone with the Wind?”, “currency of Angola” etc.

2) Navigational search: people searching for a specific online location, such as the website of British Airways or the online customer service section of HP computers.

3) Transactional search: people looking for specific items online, often but not always in order to buy, such as a color printer or picture frame.
There are hundreds of search engines online, but only a few of them are used by the majority of searchers. In order of popularity, they are Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. In August 2009, 13 billion searches were performed on Google in the US alone, with 2.8 billion on Yahoo and 1.3 billion on Microsoft’s search sites1. For the purposes of this eBook and for SEO in general, only the top search engines are discussed, with a particular focus on Google.
Search drives traffic
Search is one of the most important sources of traffic for websites, and for new and small websites (which do not enjoy the brand awareness, loyalty or monop‐oly of sites like Amazon, IMDB or Wikipedia) it often accounts for a majority of the traffic.

And traffic is the currency of the internet.

If you have a website – whether you are selling a product, advertising a service or trying to create awareness of an issue – your first goal is undoubtedly to at‐tract visitors; ideally, visitors who are interested in the product, service or infor‐mation on your website.

Scenario: Selling a CD

For the purpose of understanding how search works and why it is relevant to every website owner, imagine that you are selling a CD of relaxation techniques online. Your goal is to bring visitors to your website, ideally those who are inter‐ested in knowing more about or purchasing a relaxation CD.

Your ideal visitor will come to Google or Yahoo and search for “buy relaxation CD” or “relaxation music”. There will be others who will be looking for “relaxa‐tion techniques” or “relaxation tips” as well. The search terms they enter are known as keywords or key phrases.

Every search has an intent or purpose, and a user’s keywords are the first and greatest indicator of his or her intent.

Paid and organic search results

When a user searches for any terms on the major search engines, he sees two kinds of results on the search engine results page (SERP): paid results and organic results. Paid results are also known as ‘sponsored links’ or ‘sponsored results’. This is a form of search advertising based on keywords.

Paid results are the advertisements that search engines display based on the keywords entered by the user. They are clearly marked as sponsored, and every time a user clicks on an advertisement, the search engine makes a little bit of money. The amount depends on the popularity of and competition for that search term. For instance, “color printer” is a much more competitive (and prof‐itable) term than, say, “capital of Russia”; so there will be more sponsored links for the former, and advertisers will pay more for every click. This is also known as Pay‐per‐click or PPC advertising.

Organic search results are the “natural” results, which take up the majority of the search engine result page, and which the user usually assumes are ranked in order of importance or relevance based on the query.

Although this eBook is not about paid search advertising, it is important to know the two biggest ways in which paid search advertising is not as effective as hav‐ing a high natural rank for your keywords:

1) It is costly; you pay for user clicks and have no guarantee of making a sale.

2) Numerous studies indicate that 75‐80% of searchers click on organic results instead of paid links.

Pay per click advertising can work very well, but it is best used as part of an overall marketing strategy which includes search engine optimization for boost‐ing natural rankings.
Various search engine‐related techniques such as SEO and paid advertising to increase a website’s exposure are collectively known as search engine marketing (SEM).

Searching for a relaxation CD

Now imagine your ideal user looking for a relaxation CD online. He opens his browser, navigates to Google and searches for “relaxation CD”. Google will re‐turn nearly 7 million natural search results, and a number of sponsored links on the right based on the search term and other related queries like ‘meditation’ and ‘relaxation music’.

Out of these 7 million search results, the user is, statistically speaking, most likely to click on the top few organic results on the first SERP. The first SERP contains 10 results, and with each decreasing rank his likelihood of clicking on the page decreases. He is also much less likely to click on the second page, especially if he finds what he is looking for on the first page itself.

So lets get down to brass tax!! Rethinking Search

Clearly, it is not accurate to think of search engines as portals or doors to the web – they are more like authoritative guides. Search engines today are ex‐tremely discerning; they organize incredible amounts of information and make recommendations based on rankings which can make or break the fortunes of a website owner.

So in order to attract the right kind of users in large volumes, your website should be featured as a result on the top search engines – with a high rank for the right keywords.
The techniques by which you try to achieve high rankings for the right keywords is known as search engine optimization.

If you are insterested in SEO then this is the site for you. Need your post or blog or website to hit the top spot then give me a call and I will sort you out.

In today’s online world, your Website doesn’t mean anything to anyone unless it can be found by your customers. Optimising your site so it appears high in the search engines seems to be as much an art form as it is a science.” The quote above is from a great Website for any marketing manager responsible for search engine optimisation, SEOChat.com. Most multichannel marketers today understand that search engine marketing (SEM) (SEO) is becoming a vital part of the marketing mix.

It is becoming common knowledge on the internet that Google is the search engine that delivers the most traffic out of all the major search engines. The natural listings within a search engine receive majority of the search volume when an end user is searching for your products and services. For a website to appear in the natural (organic) listings on search engines it is essential that SEO or search engine optimisation techniques are implemented to ensure that your website is equipped with the right tools to compete and be a first page player. I believe that successful search engine optimization is the most lucrative search engine marketing strategy when advertising your website on the major search engines.

 Nowhere in all of marketing is there a more misunderstood word than optimization (as in search engine optimization). The term originated from the practice of modifying HTML on Web pages to increase “crawlability.” But it largely was replaced by search engine marketing as search became more of a marketing and advertising function than a responsibility of tech departments.

Optimization is still used in many ways, some of them confusing. But it does have a clear meaning in at least one context.

The art of SEO and it does appear to be an art is the ability to make a site appear top of the search engine results or on the first page at least for a particular ‘generic’ or ’specific’ keyword.

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