Growing Popularity

For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to other pages and in what ways. Since the late 1990's links have also served as a stand-in for votes - representing the democracy of the web's opinion about what pages are important and popular. (Some refer to this as the reasonable surfer model). The engines themselves have refined the use of link data to a fine art, and incredibly sophisticated algorithms create nuanced evaluations of site and pages based on this information.

Professional SEOs attribute a considerable portion of the search engines' algorithms to link-based factors. Through links, engines analyze the popularity of a site & page based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, as well as metrics like trust, spam, and authority. Trustworthy sites tend to link to other trusted sites, while spammy sites receive very few links from trusted sources. Authority models, like those postulated in the Hilltop Algorithm, suggest that links are a very good way of identifying expert documents in a given space.

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How Usability, User Experience And Content Affect SE Indexing

The search engines are in a constant quest to improve their results by providing the "best" possible results. While "best" is subjective, the engines have a very good idea of the kinds of pages and sites that satisfy their searchers. Generally, these sites have several traits in common:

• Easy to use, navigate, and understand
• Provide direct, actionable information relevant to the query
• Professionally designed and accessible to modern browsers
• Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content

Search engines can't understand text, view images, or watch video the same way a human being can. Thus, in order to understand content they rely on meta information (not necessarily meta tags) about sites and pages in order to rank content. The engines discovered early on that the link structure of the web could serve as a proxy for votes and popularity - higher quality sites and information earned more links than their less useful, lower quality peers. Today, link analysis algorithms have advanced considerably, but these principles hold true.

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Why SE marketing is nessessary

Search Engine Optimization is the process of taking a page built by humans and making it easily consumable for both other humans and for search engine robots. This section details some of the compromises you will need to make in order to satisfy these two very important kinds of user.

One of the most common issues we hear from folks on both the business and technology sides of a company goes something like this:

“No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been "optimized" by unlicensed search marketing experts.”

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The Beginners Guide To SEO

New to SEO? Need to polish up your knowledge? Follow my every articles

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization 

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization (since so many of those elements intertwine).

This guide is designed to describe all areas of SEO - from discovery of the terms and phrases that will generate traffic, to making a site search engine friendly, to building the links and marketing the unique value of the site/organization's offerings. Don't worry, if you are confused about this stuff, you are not alone.