How Search Engines & SEO Work
A search engine (like Google, or Bing, or Yahoo) works using two main things: 1) a database of information, and 2) algorithms that compute which results to return and rank for a given query.
The database is trillions of web pages (by URL - eg. http://yourdomain.com).
The algorithms look at hundreds of factors to deliver the most relevant results.
A program assesses the relative importance of new and known URLs. It then decides when to crawl for new URLs and how often to re-crawl known URLs. Google's main crawler is called Googlebot. It crawls the web and indexes the content it finds.
Search engines discover new content by regularly re-crawling known websites where new links often get added over time. Then, when you search for something, it finds matching results and uses a complex algorithm to rank them by relevance.
This is why having a blog or other regular new content on your website is so important. Each blog creates a new URL to your website and creates more relevant content, which helps improve your Search ranking over time.
Note: While internet search engines crawl platforms like Facebook and YouTube, these platforms have their own Search Engines within.
How Google’s Search Algorithms Work
Google's algorithms look at hundreds of factors to find and rank relevant content. Nobody except Google's engineers actually know what all of these factors are, but they provide a general guideline. Here are a few of them:
Topical Relevance: Keywords in headlines and elsewhere throughout a website, plus related phrases or concepts.
Search Intent: Predicting the 4 C's of what a searcher wants: content style (text, images, videos), content type (eg. blog post, product), content format (how to's, news articles), and content angles (eg. "for beginners").
Freshness: Predicting if the searcher wants something new or classic, for example.
Content Quality: Expertise, authoritativeness, and trust (Google calls this EAT). Age of a website, public reputation (eg. a medical association has more authority than a new independent doctor's site), and backlinks are important. (Backlinks are links from other sites. They vouch for your reputation by being willing to point to you. The more the better, as long as the links are from legit/quality sites.)
Usability: Page speed, mobile/responsive websites (technical factors).
Personalization: Location and language, for example.
Why SEO is Important
SEO is the process of boosting these hundreds of signals to rank higher in the organic search results. The benefits, over time, can be:
Higher search ranking leads to more traffic.
Higher search ranking leads to a more consistent form of traffic (vs. social media, for example).
Higher search ranking that's "organic" (not a paid ad/SEM) is low-cost over time.
Do You Need SEO Services?
If you have a website for your business and want to increase traffic, the answer is yes. For select clients, our SEO Services offer a customized, quality approach to SEO for your business.
