What is search engine optimization, why is it important and how does it work?

SEO means “search engine optimization” and it’s the process of engineering a website for the purpose of improving it’s natural search engine rankings. Not to be confused with paid listings, the natural or “organic” rankings are the algorithmic placement of your website listing in the search results at Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc.

Top search engine rankings don’t happen by accident. It’s not random. In simple terms, search engines are machines that use a formula to rank web pages. Understanding how the machine works is where SEO begins. Contact one of our Freelance SEO Consultants India to find out more about your website and how you can dominate your market on search engine results.

A proper SEO effort will obtain top rankings, but will go beyond rankings to include measures that improve the click rate of the listings that appear in the search results and improve the rate of conversion from search engine traffic into leads, sales, and customers.

SEO is evolving. SEO used to be mainly about keyword usage, lots of links, and making sure your site has no technical or configuration problems. It still is, but in addition to the traditional factors, new factors have been introduced. Below we talk about the seven main areas where SEO comes into play – we see them as being Relevance, Quality, Authority, Trust, Compliance, Metrics and Social Signals.

Relevance

This relates to the proper usage of keywords within the code and content of the page, in the links that point to the page, and the pages the links come from. Google wants searchers to find what they are looking for. Google likes to see the keywords used in your titles, headlines, file names, folder names, headline tags and other locations. Google also expects to see some co-occurrance terms, synonyms etc. Further, the anchor text of the incoming links can have a major effect on a sites relevance score for a particular keyword.

Content Quality

Google is getting better in its effort to combat high volume, low quality page creation. Google has developed techniques to evaluate the quality of the content and is learning to detect content that is “thin”, machine generated, “spun”, duplicated from other pages, or pages written with poor grammar or spelling errors.

Authority

Historically this relates to how important an individual page is, however we now see some domain-level authority being used across a site. Authority comes from back links. Essentially, each link is a vote, where a webmaster is saying “hey there is something over here worth looking at”. Each page has an authority score which is calculated based on the links that point to it. More links, more authority, but links from pages who themselves have a high authority score contribute more value than lesser authority pages.

Trust

TrustRank was developed at Stanford and originally used by Yahoo. Google uses something very similar. Certain sites are manually determined to be trusted and form the nucleus of TrustRank, according to the patent filing. Trusted sites may include a nucleus of government, university, non-profits, and human-edited directories like Yahoo or DMOZ, etc. Links from trusted sites are also trusted, so 2nd level sites that have a link from a nucleus site gain a portion of that trust. And when these 2nd level sites link out to others, a declining portion of trust flows to level 3, level 4 and so forth. Each site on the web will have a trust rank based on its degree(s) of link separation(s) from nucleus site(s) in the link matrix.

Compliance

There are two main areas of compliance. One is related to abiding by the search engines rules, like the Google Webmaster Guidelines. The other is related to technical issues involved with how the site is coded or how the server etc. is configured. A misstep in either area can hold back or even ruin websites rankings.

The Google Webmaster Guidelines are the rules of the road. Violate them, and suffer a ranking problem, or worse, an eviction from the Google index. In addition – too many low quality links can cause a penalty. Too many links too fast can cause a penalty. Google expects to see a “natural” or normal looking link profile and rate of link growth (called link velocity). There are at least 100 ways to get penalized.

Visitor Metrics

For the past few years, Google has been monitoring how users behave after clicking a search listing, and uses the data as a ranking signal. In many cases, Google can continue to see how the visitor behaves even after they have left the Google results page, with millions of users having a Google Toolbar installed. It only makes sense for them to use this data. For example, if a certain page has a high bounce rate over time for a particular keyword, a search engine may decide to adjust things so that page would no longer be highly ranked for that keyword.

Social Signals

A page that has +1, Likes, traffic or links coming from a social site must have some value right? If a company is mentioned frequently, has buzz, and gains “citations” (not necessarily links) this can be a strong indicator of value. Just as important, exposure on a social network, review site or local directory that increases traffic to your site will ultimately increase your inbound links. Think about how natural links occur – someone finds your page, likes it, and then links to it. But they have to find it, in order to like it. Helping people find your page, from a social network or anywhere else, is a good thing for SEO and for your business in general.

There are hundreds of other factors. Even how quickly a page loads is a ranking factor.

How To get Great Rankings

The goal is to make the website perform well in all of the areas mentioned above. This can be accomplished with an SEO strategy leveraging a deep understanding of the ranking process, and utilizing advanced skills in the areas of content writing, link building, promotion, and programming.

Each SEO company has their own internal procedures, however the goals are always the same. Most competent white-hat SEO companies will perform their work in a similar manner.