Understanding How Search Engines Work
Core Seo Strategy
Your core traffic strategy will evolve around using Search Engine Optimization to get search engine traffic, with a goal of getting top 10 or 20 search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other secondary search engines. At the same time, you’ll get by-product traffic from blogs, websites, article sites, business directories, Web 2.0/social sites and more.
Search engine traffic is some of the highest quality targeted traffic you can get. These visitors are high quality because they were specifically looking for your company’s products or services. These are motivated consumers seeking you out… You’re not chasing them! You’re attracting them.
The trick to SEO is to target the right keyword in the right way. And, the result is that the traffic is going to get drawn to your website for a long period over time, virtually automating your traffic.
How Search Engine Work
Keywords: These terms and phrases are the foundation of the search engine results. The search engines review the structure and content of your site to understand how you’ve used keywords and then use that information in their algorithm to rank your site’s content.
Web Pages: The search engines rank pages, not websites. What this means is that each page of your site must be structured and optimized for specific keywords in order to get ranked properly. If used the right way, you will be rewarded for high rankings, if not, you won’t get the results you want no matter how hard you work.
On-Page Website Analysis: When Google looks at your website, it looks at both the website as a whole and the individual pages. It reviews your site structure, sitemap, internal linking between pages, admin pages (About Us, Privacy, Terms, Contact Us, etc.).
On-Page Individual Page Analysis: Google’s review of each page on your site includes factors like the domain name of the page, Meta tags, Title tag, page copy for keywords and quality.
Off-Page Analysis: The primary activity reviewed by Google are the “inbound links” (or backlinks) coming from other sites to your website. This includes “forced links” where you intentionally create those links and “natural” links where others link to your site because they find you site of value to their site. The critical components of these inbound links include: anchor text of the link, quality of the site linked from based on PageRank and the relevance of the page/site linked from to the content of the page being linked to.
Combining these components to create an Effective Seo strategy is the key to high search engine rankings. Most experts agree at the time of this writing that the effect of on-page optimization contributes 20%, while off-page optimization contributes 80% to Google’s search engine algorithm to determining its search results.
Author Steve Josephs is owner of Intellidon Marketing LLC, a Search Engine Marketing and SEO Services firm specializing in attracting new customers for local businesses through Online Marketing Strategies. See: Wikipedia on Search Engine Optimization.
