What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
Search engine optimization is the practice of making improvements to your web pages for the purpose of getting a search engine to place them at the top of the page.
What is a search engine?
If you’ve been in hibernation for the last 20 years then I might need to explain a few more concepts to you.
First of all we have websites. Websites are effectively documents that are accessed through the internet. The most direct way to access a website is through the Universal Resource Locator (URL).
However, in the early days of the internet the number of websites expanded very quickly.
There was an increase in the number of “directory” websites. These websites worked like the yellow pages. You could request to have your website listed in a specific category of the website. These websites became the “homepage” of the internet. Yahoo is a really good example.
The problem with these directory websites is that they were still manually managed. Human beings had to review requests to list new sites and determine which sites should be listed at the top of the directory.
A new concept soon emerged called a search engine. Instead of going through the categories (Shopping > Clothing > Women’s Clothing > Shoes > High Heels) to find what you were looking for you could choose to type a search term into the search bar and expect to find results. Typing in “red women’s high heel shoes” would get you to a result much more quickly than the old navigation method.
In order to power this search, keep it up to date, and provide relevant results the engines had to come up with a few new concepts.
The first concept that they introduced was that of an index. An index saves a bunch of information about a website into a database. This index catalogs millions of websites, the URLs of the site, the text on the site, the images on the site, etc. All of the information in the index is data that can be used by the algorithm.
The next concept that they developed was that of a search results algorithm. The goal of the algorithm is to provide the most relevant results given the search entered into the search bar. Over time the algorithm has improved substantially. As an example when you search for “red hat” you’ll see search results for a software company but when you type in “red hat for sale” you’ll see a bunch of shopping websites. The reason the algorithm is important is because it controls your experience with the search engine. If you had to dig through pages and pages of results to find what you’re looking for the search engine didn’t really save you much time. Therefore, they’re trying to match you with the perfect result for your query on the first search.
The last concept that was introduced is the concept of a spider or a crawler. The problem with an index is that it is a database based on past information. A search engine is fast because it looks up information in a database. It would be really slow if it actually went out to search every website on the internet. Therefore, to ensure that the algorithm is working well the index/database needs to be regularly updated. A spider or crawler is simply a robot that will go to a website and add/modify/remove information from the index based on what it finds. This ensures that the index has fresh and relevant results.
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo have gotten a lot smarter over the past few years. They can now provide maps, images, flights, shopping advertisements and a variety of other results that they weren’t able to provide in the past. Amazon also has a search engine but it is limited to the 500,000,000 products in their catalog.
The newest challenge for search engines comes from voice. Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant all allow people to do searches with a verbal command. This is really cool technology for consumers but adds new complexity for the search engine.
What is optimization?
Business owners want their business to be at the top of the search results page. Why? Because this represents an opportunity to get new customers!
Getting to the top of Google is so enticing that spammers/scammers often use this as a headline in their emails. “Want to rank #1 on Google?”
The simplest way to get to the top of Google is to be the “best result” for the search query provided.
To understand what Google might consider the “best result” you should take a look at their ranking factors. There are a variety of different things taken into account including: content relevancy, domain authority, mobile friendliness, page load time, social signals and more.
To make things simple here’s an easy example:
- Search Term: Benjamin Arp Blog
- Page Title: Benjamin Arp – Personal Blog
- URL: benjaminarp.com
- Description: Benjamin Arp Personal Blog
You’ll notice that there’s a strong match between the search term and the words in the page title, URL and description.
Unfortunately, if you search for “best ecommerce blog 2019” my blog is nowhere to be found.
Why is that?
There are a variety of reasons but the easiest answer is because I don’t have a page on my website titled “best ecommerce blog of 2019.” Interestingly Google doesn’t know which ecommerce blog is the “best” but when you search for that specific term you get articles like, “10 Best Ecommerce Blogs.”
This is a really important insight. Google often “cheats” by presenting you with a list page, a category page, or a collection page related to your query.
The likelihood that you find the best ecommerce blog of 2019 is much higher when you go to a blog post that ranks the top 10 or top 100 blogs.
The likelihood that you find the red high heel shoes that you’re looking for on a page like this is much higher than on a page like this.
As humans we’re often better at knowing the category of the thing that we want than we are at knowing the exact thing. There are many more searches for “Thai restaurants near me” than there are for “Bamboo Fresh Thai Cuisine, La Mesa.” Ranking well for these search terms is what can help drive new traffic to your business.
The last thought I’ll leave you with is about understanding the value of the long queries. Everyday new things are typed into the search engine. Queries that have never been typed before. That means there are new ranking opportunities!
Unless you’re Nike or some large retailer you likely won’t rank for “Nike Shoes.” However, if you’re a sneaker collector you might be able to get a page ranked for “Blue Size 11 Air Force One’s for Sale in El Cajon, California.” Right now none of the results that I see for that query are very good.
Ranking for hundreds or thousands of long queries takes a lot of time and won’t net you nearly as many results as the shorter terms like “Nike Shoes.” However, there is less competition for the long queries and they are generally more specific. The more specific the query the higher the intent of the searcher. Keep that in mind as you grow your business.
