What is SEO ?

This post is for complete beginners who don’t know the first thing about SEO.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the science of improving your search engine rankings. In the old days SEO used to involve making sure you have the right words in the right place on your webpages but those were the days when there was very little competition online.

Today there are BILLIONS of web pages online and depending on your niche and geographic location, you will have to compete with a large number of other websites.

For a search engine like Google to understand which are the best sites, it not only analyzes the words on your web pages (on-site factors) but it also places a very high importance on external indicators of how good your website is (off-site factors).

Google includes more than 100 different factors in its algorithm, which in simple terms is the formula it uses to rank web pages, and it constantly updates its algorithm to try and give users the most relevant results.

One of the main things a search engine like Google is looking for is “social proof” that your site is good. Your website can claim you are the best at what you do, but if there is no-one else talking about how good your website is, why should Google put it on the top of the search results?

The on-site factors are still very important, because after all, pages are made up of words, and words have meaning, and the search engines job is to understand the meaning of the words on the page. You will find that it is easy to rank for a very specific phrase, such as your company name, where there is not much competition.

However the more competition there is for the words you want to rank for, the more social proof you are going to need, and therefore SEO focuses just as much on how to get that social proof.

1) On-site Factors deal with the words on your pages and the structure on your site.
2) Off-site Factors deal with how to get social proof that your site is the best.

Your first step in SEO training should be to understand what people are searching for so you can use those search terms in your SEO campaign. Find out more here about keyword research.

HISTORY OF SEO

In the early days of search engine optimisation, it was enough to simply your website had the right words in the right place to get good search rankings. However webmasters started to abuse this by stuffing keywords into their pages so they could rank even for search terms not related to their website.

The search engines first got round this by changing their algorithm to include a measure of “link popularity”. This basically measured how many links you had to your website.

BUT… webmasters soon started to realise they could get better rankings by adding their website URL into “link farms” and by reciprocal linking with other sites in order to get lots of incoming links.

SO… the search engines fought back by analysing not only how many incoming links a website has, but also how relevant those incoming links were.
A link from a relevant or authority website is much more valuable than a simple link from a non-relevant site. Think of it like a “vote”.

THEN… came multiple directory listings… Some seo companies created hundreds of vertical directories and you could pay them to have your website listed in directories which were most relevant to your business. While this might give some relevance, Google has a 10,000 mile view of the web and it can detect when a site suddenly gets hundreds of new incoming links…

SO… Google now looks at not only the number and type of links you have to your site, but the quality of those links and the pattern of those links over time.

In order to understand the quality of the sites linking to your website, Google also tries to understand their on-site relevancy as well as their off-site relevancy, for example are they “authority” or trusted sites like Wikipedia, and is there a lot of “buzz” about them in the news or on social networks, or how many people have bookmarked them on social bookmarking sites.

Now that you know you can’t just get a good ranking by ensuring you have good keywords on your page, and paying for a bunch of links, lets look at how to go about it the right way…. Just sign up on the homepage for our free SEO training videos about keyword research and you will be well on your way to getting good search rankings.