SEO: Search Engine Optimization

It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines. In laymen's terms, good SEO gets your link to the top of google when someone types in relevant search terms.

All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content such as videos or local listings are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. Payment isn’t involved, as it is with paid search ads.

Reclaim Renew makes custom barnwood furniture in St. Louis. Let's take a look at a couple of screen shots. Notice the search term changes from barnwood, barnwood furniture, and custom barnwood furniture. When does Reclaim Renew show up in the search?

Finally, on the third search term "Customer Barnwood Furniture," local companies start to appear with Reclaim Renew leading the way. This is just one example of how search terms can lead people towards or away from a business. We could have also looked at barnwood walls, customer mantels, rustic dining room tables, or annie sloan chalkboard paint.

1. Starting Out - Google is not looking at the internet. Google looks at their index of the internet.

2. Crawling - The crawling process begins with a list of web addresses from past crawls and sitemaps provided by website owners. As our crawlers visit these websites, they use links on those sites to discover other pages. The software pays special attention to new sites, changes to existing sites and dead links.

3. Organizing Information - The Google Search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. It’s like the index in the back of a book — with an entry for every word seen on every web page we index. When we index a web page, we add it to the entries for all of the words it contains.

4. Answers - People want the answer, not billions of webpages, so Google ranking systems sort through the hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second.

Warning: Search Engines want people to perform great SEO when developing sites. This improves users experience by providing searchers with accurate and relevant content. If you try to cheat the system, you will be punished by the Search Engine.

Content

1. Content Quality - More than anything else, are you producing quality content? If you’re selling something, do you go beyond being a simple brochure with the same information that can be found on hundreds of other sites? Are you offering real value on the page itself, not just in the product?
2. Content research/keyword research - Perhaps the most important SEO factor after creating good content is good keyword research. You want to create content using those keywords, the actual search terms people are using, so you can produce content that effectively “answers” that query.
3. Content words/use of keywords - If you want your pages to be found for particular words, it’s a good idea to actually use those words in your copy. Use good writing to integrate the words properly within the page.
4. Content freshness - Search engines love new content.
5. Vertical search - The other factors on this table cover success for web page content in search engines. But alongside these web page listings are also often “vertical” results. These come from “vertical” search engines devoted to things like images, news, local and video. If you have content in these areas, it might be more likely to show up within special sections of the search results page.

Site Architecture

1. Crawlability - Search engines “crawl” websites, going from one page to another incredibly quickly, acting like hyperactive speed-readers. They make copies of your pages that get stored in what’s called an “index,” which is like a massive book of the web. Things like flash and javascript can make it harder for search engines to crawl.
2. Mobile-Friendly - Websites should naturally transition from computer to phone based browsers.

HTML

1. Title Tag - HTML titles have always been and remain the most important HTML signal that search engines use to understand what a page is about. Bad titles on your pages are like having bad book titles in the examples above.
2. Meta Description Tag - Allows you to suggest how you’d like your pages to be described in search listings. If the HTML title is the equivalent of a book title, the meta description is like the blurb on the back describing the book.

Trust and Authority

1. Authority - Is your site an authority? Is it a widely recognized leader in its field, area, business or in some other way? That’s the goal. A blog is a great way to accomplish this online.
2. Engagement - A quality site should produce meaningful interactions with users. Search engines may try to measure this interaction — engagement — in a variety of ways. For example, how long do users stay on your page?
3. History - Since search engines are constantly visiting your website, they can get a sense of what’s “normal” or how you’ve behaved over time. You don't want to be in the bard neighborhood online.

Linking Building

1. Link Quality - It’s one of those “you’ll know it when you see it” types of things in many cases. But a link from any large, respectable site is going to be higher on the quality scale than a link you might get from commenting on a blog. In addition, links from those in your “neighborhood,” sites that are topically relevant to your site, may also count more. Again, search engines live on building relevant content.
2. Link Text - The words within a link — the link text or “anchor text” — are seen by search engines as the way one website is describing another. It’s as if someone’s pointing at you in real life and saying “books” and declaring you an expert on that topic.
3. Number of Links - Plenty of sites have found that getting a whole lot of links can add up to SEO success. Even more so if you’re getting a lot of links from many different sites. All things being equal, 1,000 links from one site will mean far less than 1000 links from 1000 sites.

Personalization

1. Country - One of the easiest personalization ranking factors to understand is that people are shown results relevant to the country they’re in. Someone in the US searching for “football” will get results about American football; someone in the UK will get results about the type of football that Americans would call soccer.
2. Locality - Search engines don’t stop personalizing at the country level. They’ll tailor results to match the city or metropolitan area based on the user’s location.

Social

1. Reputation - Just as search engines don’t count all links equally, they don’t view all social accounts as being the same. This makes sense, since anyone can create a new account on a social network. What’s to prevent someone from making 100 different accounts to manufacture fake buzz?
2. Nothing, really, other than the fact that fake accounts like these can often be easy to spot. They may only have a handful of “quality” friends in their network, and few might pass along material they share.
3. Shares - Similar to links, getting quality social shares is ideal, but being shared widely on social networks is still helpful. Good things happen when more people see your site or brand.

Student Activity

1. Understand the competition.
   1. What are they doing well?
   2. What content themes do they have that you’re lacking?
   3. Do they structure their site differently to target more valuable keywords
   4. Do they have interesting features to better engage their prospects?
2. Use Keyword Planner to research trends.
3. Plan your site.
   1. Critically important pages
   2. Mid Tier
   3. Low Tier
4. Optimize your site
   1. Desktop
   2. Mobile
5. Write Content beyond Keywords
6. Manage Google Analytics

Sources

• https://searchengineland.com/guide/seo/types-of-search-engine-ranking-factors
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=hF515-0Tduk
• https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing/