What is Search Engine Optimization SEO | Major Benefits of SEO 2020

What is Search Engine Optimization SEO

it's the practice of optimizing content to be discovered through a search engines organic search results think of a search engine as a filing system in a library the library has potentially billions of books with hundreds of trillions of pages. so let's say you want to find information on health supplements the search engine will then look through all pages in its index and try to return the most relevant results now the first search engine you're probably thinking of is Google Search Engine but there are tons of other search engines you can optimize your content your website .

How SEO WORK

for example YouTube SEO is the process of getting traffic to your videos in YouTube's organic search results amazon SEO is the same but you're optimizing your product pages to get free organic traffic. Google SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank on Google and drive more traffic to your web pages. now search engines use sophisticated algorithms and technology to return the best results for any given query nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work but we have clues particularly for Google.

Major Benefits of SEO

So we can make some optimizations now why should you incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy well. there are three major benefits of search engine optimization that attracts marketers from all over the world number one traffic from your SEO efforts are free number two your traffic will be consistent once you're ranking high and number three you have the opportunity to reach massive audiences you wouldn't have access to otherwise now since every search engine has unique algorithms.

How Google and its Spiders Work

We won't be able to cover how each of them works and for that reason we're going to be focusing on how Google works to rank pages since. it's the largest search engine and the one that we here at hrs have the most information on so how does Google work well there are two main terms you need to understand these are crawling and indexing to actually retain information. Google uses crawlers also known as spiders which gather publicly available information from all over the web the spiders start with a list of URLs which they may have previously crawled or found in sitemaps these are called seeds.

They then follow the** hyperlinks** on the pages from the seeds and then crawl those newly discovered pages. this process goes on and on allowing them to build a massive index of information they then take all of this data back to Google servers to be added to what they call their search index their algorithms then work by taking things like keywords and content freshness to categorize quarries so they can return the most relevant results to searchers in a fraction of a second now Google isn't just about matching keywords  within a search query they've created something called the knowledge graph which according to Google goes beyond keyword matching to better understand the people places and things you care about.

How Search algorithms Work

I'll show you some examples of this in a bit for now let's dig into the details of how their search algorithm works again Google's goal is to sort through hundreds of trillions of webpages within their search index and find the most relevant results in a fraction of a second on Google's how search algorithms work page they say that they lo ok at the words of a searches query relevance.

Usability of pages expertise of sources in your** location** and settings these ranking factors aren't linear but they're weighted differently depending on the nature of your query an.  example they mentioned that freshness of content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics however for definition based queries like what is search engine optimization freshness wouldn't play as large of a factor since this core definition itself hasn't really changed in addition to technology-based innovations like artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Google also uses a group of people to manually assess how well a website gives people who click on their results what they're looking for these people are called search quality raters rest assured. these aren't people at Google manually moving your webpage around in the search results because they like or don't like you these people don't directly impact rankings but rather helps Google benchmark the quality of their results for now let's dig deeper into a few broad categories of Google's ranking factors the first and most obvious thing they need to do is understand the meaning of a quarry.

For example if you search for slow cooker recipes what do you expect to see in Google search results probably a list of recipes right and that's how Google interprets the quarry too but what if you just search for the word slow-cooker what would you expect to see after keying that into google search you'll see product listings and e-commerce category pages Google is able to interpret that someone's searching for this phrase likely has the intent to purchase the appliance rather than look for recipes in that time understanding the meaning of a quarry comes down to language Google has created language models to decipher strings of words they should look up they understand that when you type slow coker that you're actually looking for slows cooker.

They also understand synonyms for example looking at the search results for how to make a website you'll see that they've bolded synonyms within the search results beyond language search algorithms also try to understand the type of information you're looking for.

For example if you search for ps4 unboxing you'll see that the top 10 Google search results are chock-full of pages from YouTube they understand that anyone searching for an unboxing tutorial would likely prefer video content over text or images whereas a quarry like map of New York will show you image results as well as a widget from Google Maps now what about a query like best Mexican restaurant you'll see that Google shows restaurants that are close to your location despite not entering a city name in the query and that's because someone searching for this isn't going to fly halfway across the world for lunch another part of interpreting a searchers query comes down to freshness for example if you search for Donald Trump Google understands that people likely want recent news over biographies so they give priority in their top stories widget from reputable sources they also understand that.

if you're looking for something like best headphones that you likely want fresh information since new models and manufacturers are always on the rise and you can identify this right in Google search results seeing as all top ranking pages have the current year in the title most if not all of the things .

we've covered here can be summed up into what SEO is often refer to as search intent which basically means the reason behind a searches query this is arguably one of the most important things to master as an SEO if you're unable to match the searches intent in terms of content type and format your chances of ranking are slim but there are additional layers to understand how Google works this leads us nicely into how Google identifies relevance through content on a web page in the most basic form search engines will look at the content of the page to see.

If the words on that page are relevant to your query but they're sophisticated enough to go beyond exact match keywords Google understands related keywords to a page increases in relevance with other semantically similar keywords for example if you have an article on how to get a driver's license you may have subsections on licensing for cars motorcycles and buses these are all automobiles and should have keyword overlaps that help connect the topic as a whole.

for example road driving seatbelt safety exam and test these would all be semantically relevant keywords that can help search engines better understand what your post is about another example would be if you are creating a post on the best luxury watches now I want you to think of a five letter word that pops to mind when it comes to luxury watches let me help you out a bit Rolex and if you look at the content of the top 10 ranking pages you'll see that they all include that brand other popular luxury brands and likely have watch related jargon like bezel bridge or chronograph rather than returning results that have best luxury watches written a hundred times on the page Google can see which pages are the most relevant to the searches request and google confirms this by saying these relevant signals help search algorithms assess whether a webpage contains an answer to your search query rather than just repeating the same question another factor Google looks at is the quality of content Google tries to prioritize and rank the most reliable sources.

what quality content is impossible to objectively nail 100% they use three broad categories to help identify quality pages these are expertise authoritative nough sand trustworthiness on a given topic also known as eat one signal that Google mentions are getting websites to link to your content which SEO is called backlinks.

Links built up a pages authoritative nacelle line in Google's famous paper  on Page Rank from a general view think of backlinks as votes when people link to your pages they're essentially vouching for your content and telling their readers that they should check out your page for more information now to prevent people from gaming the system Google uses spam algorithms to try and identify deceptive or manipulative behavior one example will be link exchanges meaning you contact other webmasters and ask them to link to you and in return you'll link to them we won't dig too deep into these factors.

how they assess quality content another factor of Google considers is usability of web pages. Google wants to show results that keep their searchers happy and this goes beyond providing the right content for the quarry there are a couple of confirmed ranking factors that relate to usability the first is PageSpeed Google found that as page load time increases the probability of bounce or the chance of someone leaving your website without visiting another page goes up dramatically and it makes sense if Google were to show slow loading pages that result in bounces then that dissatisfaction would increase amongst their users as a result Google announced in 2018 that Page Speed will become a part of their mobile search ranking algorithm.

Second usability factor is mobile friendliness today website should appear correctly no matter what device you're on and no matter what browser you're using this is often referred to as responsive design Google has shifted to mobile first indexing this means that they'll predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking and as of July 1st 2019 all new websites will be mobile first by default all of these things and many more factors can be summarized into user experience Google wants to return results that are both relevant and provide a solid user experience a very cool and somewhat controversial way that Google works is through personalized data.

Google keeps track of your location past search history and search settings to tailor your results to what is most useful and relevant for you in that moment but as many people are becoming aware of privacy issues on the Internet this may leave you extremely satisfied or perhaps on edge let's look at a few examples of how personalization affects your Google searches.

how personalization affects your Google searches.

So for example, I am  in Toronto Canada so when I type in the letter B Google provides relevant search suggestions to my location like Blue Jays which is our baseball team and BMO which is a major bank in Canada now if I change my IP address to one in Chicago then you'll see very different results like Bank of America and Barnes & Noble which is a popular bank and books or respectively and let's look at how they tailor search suggestions based on previous searches.

let's say I want to find hotels in Barcelona I'll start typing in hotels and let's say that I actually changed my mind halfway through the search take a second and look through the results you'll see that they're all tailored to my current location so let's delete this instead I want to search for things to do in Barcelona so I can choose a hotel around that location now I'll search for what to do in Barcelona lots of fun stuff now it's time to find a hotel so if I start typing in hotels you'll see that Google's first auto suggestion is hotels in Barcelona which as you saw before was not the case these are just a few basic ways Google works and it's absolutely critical that you understand.

when you're learning SEO by understanding how search works you can begin optimizing your pages with some level of direction so how do you start optimizing your website for search Read this article.