Everybody knows SEO is important, but not everyone knows what it actually means. What is it and how does it work? Why is it so important? What can you do to make sure your site is SEO optimized?
This blog series will help you understand what Search Engine Optimization is and how you can begin optimizing your Redman real estate website. First, we are going to define Search Engine Optimization, then we wil gain a better understanding of how search engines work and how a service like Google creates the list of sites that are returned when you search for a particular phrase.
So, what is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to the process of improving your website’s natural ranking for specific targeted search terms or phrases, often called “keywords”.
There are literally millions of websites on the internet, and Search Engines like Google and Bing are how people sort through those millions of sites to find the information they are looking for. By using SEO tactics and techniques, you can help these search engines understand which keywords should be associated with your website, allowing it to be shown higher up in the search results. The higher you appear in rankings for particular keywords, the more likely people are to visit your website. In general, the higher up in the listings a website appears, the more traffic the site will receive.
How do Search Engines work?
Understanding how search engines work at a high level will help us better wrap our heads around the hows and whys of SEO techniques. Search Engines like Google are complicated computer programs that are constantly changing, and the way they work is regularly refined by the people who run them. At their most basic level, however, all search engines work the same way.
1. Spidering and Crawling
You’ve probably heard the term “search spider” or “web crawler” used when referring to search engines before. A search spider is actually a specialized computer program or robot whose job it is to find web pages. They visit major websites and servers, then follow every link they find.
2. Indexing
Once a web crawler finds a page, it makes a copy of parts of the code that makes up the page and stores the information in a massive database where it can be sorted and quickly recalled.
3. Ranking
When a person searches for something using a search engine, it does two things as it goes through their database of millions of copied web pages pieces. The first is to return only those results that it sees as relevant to the search, and the second is to rank those results in order of relevance and importance. This relevance is based on a complex computer algorithm that takes many things into account, including the site’s authority, it’s popularity, the site’s content, and many other factors. All of this complex programming takes place behind the scenes, in the split second it takes between the user hitting “search” and the results appearing on screen.
3 Important Things to Remember
1. Search spiders don’t crawl your site every single minute. They may visit every day, or maybe every week. If you’ve never updated your website content, then they may only visit once a month! Remember that when a web crawler stops by it makes and stores a copy of your site, and if it doesn’t stop by very often, the copy may be old or out of date. The best way to keep the web crawlers coming by your website often is to update your website regularly. Search engines like pages that change because that usually means they have current, relevant information rather than old, out of date content.
2. No single thing will get you to the top. Despite what others may tell you, there is no quick fix when it comes to SEO. There are certainly SEO tactics that will give you a boost and that matter more than others, but search engines have complex algorithms that rank websites that include hundreds of differently weighted factors, and these algorithms are constantly changing to include new factors or weigh them differently.
3. Relevance matters most. A search engine is primarily concerned with returning quality, relevant results, and the people behind the scenes are constantly trying to improve this relevance. Trying to trick a search engine may work in the short term, but in the long term the search engines almost always discover these tricks and retaliate by de-ranking your site or — even worse — removing your website from their index entirely.
Next time in our SEO series we’ll discuss picking the best keywords to optimize for, including broadly targeted keywords and more specific ones.
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