This post is about understanding of SEO in simple terms. SEO surely is complex but it has some basic ground rules laid to which it abides. Search engines are continuously being modified and developed to bring us information that we require. They are being developed to be more user friendly and more efficient in finding out what we seek.
SEO Simplified
This post is about understanding of SEO in simple terms. SEO surely is complex but it has some basic ground rules laid to which it abides. You will find tens of definitions about SEO but understand it as “Anything that you do to improve your site’s Search engine rankings”
To understand SEO and search engine rankings we need to understand following things:
- How search engines deliver results
- How they look for it or gather content
- How search engines match keywords to relevant results
- How would they compare and rank similar relevant sites
Stated simply, search engine’s main purpose is to deliver results that it feels we are interested in. We tell our interests in terms of keywords that we punch in the search box. When we search for some term in search engine, it literally crawls a huge database where the information in stored in some organized manner. We don’t care much about how search engines organize their content but we care about how they find the relevance. That’s it…
“Relevance of your content to the words punched in to the search box is all that matters to a search engine.”
Search engines are robots, they crawl, they spider… these are some heavy words thrown around all over SEO to sound confusing. Basically, someone comes to your website and copies all the data they find and carry it back to search engine database. They do a “CTRL + C” and “CTRL + V”. This is all you need to know, what the indexable content on your site is.
Search engines will do all they can to make you happy with the results they show with the words you punched in. “SEO is about making your site’s content search engine friendly” this means when the search engine asks you, “hey I am looking for something with reference to ABC XYZ keywords you heard of them?” and you could reply “Sure buddy, I am all for that keyword only… look it’s here in my page title, even my url and offcourse the content you want to put up in the results is all about that and related words. So help yourself!” How could this conversation go bad for your site, huh?
Now you and your pal have the same content selling store. How will anyone decide which store to recommend? Store with better popularity and more references. This is how relevance is measured. In case of websites, the popularity and references are measured as incoming links. The more websites point their links to your content, the more it is deemed relevant in the context they point it. I might have missed the goal of simplicity in the past few lines but I’ll try again, take each incoming link as a vote to your site, the more votes you have the better you are with competition.
These votes are the main criteria’s while judging the relevance of the content and the matter goes deep. As true with politics, the votes can be bought and sold. But search engines, as our govt, try to avoid these mal practices as penalizing sites engaged in link farming kind of acts. While some are considered legitimate as part of promotion activities others are dangerous to be dealing with. The definition of spam keeps changing so better build on a true reputation than trying to find loopholes in the process. It’s nice to reach there but more important to stay there for long.
