SEO Basics

S.E.O stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of optimizing content in a way that makes it discoverable by a search engine and ultimately rank on organic search results.

Unlike paid advertisements, SEO is a free way to gain search traffic to your website. Meaning, you don’t have to pay for someone to click on your organic search result.

And, once you’ve ranked high enough, the organic traffic consistently brings your business leads month after month, whereas other advertisement mediums have spikes in traffic then flatline due to stale content (old content, content marked as “read” or spam).

Lastly, you have the opportunity to reach a much larger audience. Depending on your SEO strategy, you can target a local audience (city, state) or a larger audience like a country or multiple countries around the world.

Google doesn’t like to share it’s search data, but Hubspot has estimated…

“Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second, translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. – Hubspot”

1. Crawling and Indexing
   Companies like Google and Bing use programs, often referred to as “spiders”, that gather publicly available information from all over the internet. These spiders crawl known web pages and follow the links to other pages. The crawlers repeat this process and deliver all of the data back to their respective servers to be added to their search index. That data is what we see when we query a search engine.
2. Ranking Algorithm
   Search engines have hundreds of ranking signals and routinely update the ranking algorithm multiple times a year. So it is difficult to know exactly how the algorithm works. But marketers have figured out (through studies and trials) what some of the more important ranking indicators are. And we have been given some guidelines by Google and Bing that we can follow. Some ranking factors include Backlinks (getting other relevant and authoritative sites to link back to you), Searchers Intent (showing the type of content that is most likely trying to be seen), and Content Depth (making sure the content solves the viewers problem.