How Search Engines Work: The Road to EASY SEO Tips

If you know you’re selling a product, and you know the behavior of your shopping audience, then you can surely use PPC to drum up more business, but the bulk of our focus at SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists), is really on Search Engine Optimization as an integral part of web design, thus insuring that you not only have a website, but a website that people can find without it costing you extra money on a continual basis.  In order to get organic search results, and end up on one of the first 3 pages of those results (with the first page being the “prime location”), you need to optimize your website for search engines, so that your site’s content gets returned for relevant keywords.  And how you end up on those results page, is a process known as Search Engine Optimization, and in order to do this, you first have to know how search engines work and how they operate.  A search engine uses special software (often called a “spider” or “robot”) to crawl the web, and automatically follow links and index web pages based on their readable content that’s embedded within the website’s code, then compiles that data into the search engine’s database.  The way the engine works, is when you search for a term, say for instance “wedding cakes”, the search engine checks its database for all the websites it’s crawled for the terms “wedding” and “cakes”. In terms of how a search engine like Google knows how to rank one site over another based on the relevancy of its content, THAT is the “Holy Grail question” for many Search Engine Optimizers, as people have tried for years to figure out the algorithm that’s used, but no one ever quite gets it, and the good thing is, you don’t really need to know the specifics of that, if you simply build a site that’s automatically friendly to search engine robots.  One of the best pieces of advice I give for search engine optimization when constructing new websites is to design a website first for a blind person, then construct the visual components.  Some people think this is crazy, but if your business plan calls for search engine-driven web traffic, then you need to design your websites for search engines, and in order to do that, you need text.  Because, generally speaking, search engines read text!  They can’t “see” pictures or colors or graphics, in fact, even as search engines are changing the way they’re yielding results, they’ll still using the tried and true mechanisms of acquiring names for images from the ALT image tag. How a website ranks on the search engine results page is a direct result of a variety of Website Relevancy Factors.  And while there are numerous factors that effect a website’s relevancy within search engine results, for the sake of brevity, I’ve highlighted 10 positive and negative factors that can effect your site’s ability to be ranked higher on search engines.

You can listen to this week’s podcast for more details on each factor, but here are both lists: