A very normal question that is generally asked is “What is SEO and for what reason is it significant?”. In this series of articles, you will learn concerning how SEO is and what it helps your business. Keep reading to make sure you understand and make sure to take some notes! These are professional data and tips from our professional SEO Company Markham team.
Read Part 1 of SEO Markham explains: Learning about SEO HERE.
How does GOOGLE work? | Rank #1 SEO Markham
Now, let’s briefly talk about how Google works and there are two parts to this according to our SEO Markham experts.
The first is crawling and indexation. These two things are what actually allows Google to discover web pages and create their search index. So to actually attain information, Google uses crawlers, also known as spiders, which gather publicly available information from all over the web. The spiders, according to our SEO Markham experts, will start crawling from a list of known URLs called seeds. They then follow the hyperlinks on those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages. This process goes on and on, allowing them to collect a ton of information. They then take all of this data back to Google’s servers to be added to their “search index.” That’s what people like you and I are searching through when we key in a query in Google. If you don’t know what is SEO, please read this article and how our SEO company Markham experts explain it.
Now, if you were to search for something and Google returned every result that mentioned your words on the page, then you’d end up with really bad results. Trust us, the SEO Markham professionals, that this will be chaotic. Imagine billions of websites springing into your face all at the same time. This brings us to the second part, which is Google’s ranking algorithm. Google has hundreds of ranking signals and they make tweaks to their algorithm 500 to 600 times per year. So to be frank, no one knows exactly how their algorithms work. If you want to learn more about SEO, please check our blog as we have many different topics and questions that we answer.
But they’ve given us clues and some guidelines to better understand the factors that are most important. In addition, third party companies like our SEO company Markham have done studies to test and better understand these factors.
Now, I won’t bore you with over 200 ranking signals, many which are just speculation at best, but I do want to cover a few of the most important factors that you’ll need to understand from a fundamental standpoint.
First are backlinks
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. Google has said on their “How Search Works” page that if other prominent websites link to a page, that’s proof to be a good sign that information is well trusted. The easiest way to understand the value of a backlink is to think of them as votes. When a page receives a backlink, it’s essentially another website vouching for the content on the page. The more “votes,” you get from credible sources, the higher the trust. We also studied the effect of backlinks on search traffic and found a clear positive correlation between backlinks from unique websites and a page’s organic traffic.
Second is search intent
The search intent represents the reason behind a searcher’s query. If you think of Google’s goal for search, their job is to return the most relevant results for any given query. This also means that Google will try to give the most viewed, the most relevant, and the best (in their algorithms opinion) website it can. So with that said, you can discover search intent simply by looking at the top ranking pages for the query you want to rank for. For example, if you search for “slow cooker recipes,” you’ll see that the search results are mostly blog posts with a list of slow cooker recipes. So if you try and rank a product page where you’re selling a slow cooker, you won’t be matching search intent and therefore, you won’t rank. If you do want to rank on these keywords, make sure to check our page out of our SEO Company.
Now, if we change the query to just “slow cooker,” you’ll see that the dominant types of pages are ecommerce category pages. So if you try and rank your blog post of slow cooker recipes, then you probably won’t rank because you’re not matching search intent. This is a critical concept to understand and I’ll share a simple 3-step checklist you can use to determine search intent for any query in the next module. And third is content depth. Search engines are made up of computer programs. So they can’t actually read and understand text like you and I would. Nevertheless, Google has poured billions of dollars into creating sophisticated technology that understands content to a certain degree. But it’s your job as a content creator to provide context about the subject.
For example, if you look at the top ranking pages for the query “how to drive a car,” you’ll find that they talk about things like, fastening your seatbelt, familiarizing yourself with the gas and brake pedals, adjusting your seat and mirrors, and other things that a first-time driver may not know. Basically, you want to be able to answer the searcher’s query the best that you possibly can. And naturally, it should lead to content that has depth. Now, it’s important to note that depth doesn’t always translate to length. For example, a topic like “how to turn off iPhone 12” doesn’t need to and shouldn’t be long. In fact, the top ranking page is only 185 words. But the content itself solves the user’s query from start to finish. Alright, so the basics are in the book and it’s time to move on to the keyword research module.
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