Implementing efficient SEO campaigns requires a very good understanding of the optimization process itself and how search engine processes work.
Google keeps rolling out algorithm updates, adding new web spam filters that eliminate poor-quality websites from the search index and help users find relevant information more easily. But despite these frequent changes, the core SEO success factors have stayed essentially the same over the last years. By learning these core elements, companies can understand how search engines retrieve, index and deliver information, so they can ultimately build strong SEO strategies that bring a huge ROI.
There are two approaches to learning how SEO works that have made themselves stand out over the past few years. The standard way involves finding SEO issues and fixing them, an approach that teaches individuals the basics of SEO, but not the reasons to do it. The other approach focuses on SEO as a form of computer science, and specifically Information Retrieval, or IR, which is what search engines themselves do. However, this approach is far too technical for most of us, and requires many years of intense study and practice before one can use his knowledge.
If you want to flourish in your digital marketing career, you need to understand how SEO works from both points of view – and this is what we will be talking about today.
Understanding the 3 Pillars of SEO
Search engine optimization has three fundamental parts, most commonly referred to as pillars: the Technology pillar, the Relevance pillar, and the Authority pillar.
While technology implies every technical aspect of a website (XML sitemap, URL structure, HTML coding, HTTP status codes), relevance refers to readability, meta tags, headlines, content structure (in essence, everything that makes a website relevant to a search query). Authority is supported on the relevance pillar, and refers to backlinks, citations, social media signals, trustworthiness signals, and other elements that make your website appear as a highly credible source.
1. Technology
The technology pillar ensures that your site is properly structured, and can be correctly crawled and indexed by search engines. Outlined below are the most important technical elements of a website:
- Clean URL structure, without parameters such as post publication date, category/subcategory or author.
- Correct HTTP status codes – e.g. 404 status code for “Not Found” pages, 301 status code for “Moved Permanently” pages, etc.
- XML sitemap: provides search engines with a hierarchy and breakdown of your website for faster indexing.
Usually, website platforms play a big role in how search engine-friendly a website is – for example, WordPress integrates many core SEO principles into its structure, while .NET doesn’t. However, many WordPress override the platform’s initial settings, which is why you should spend more time auditing your website’s technology.
2. Relevance
Search engines have grown to understand what a website’s content is all about. The relevance pillar refers to various on-page elements that determine whether your content can be correctly interpreted. Optimizing these elements means creating content that is more relevant to users’ queries.
Some of the most notable elements that determine the relevance of your website include:
- Optimized headlines, with the main keyword included as close to the front as possible and length not exceeding 50-60 characters.
- Properly structured content, with heading tags (H2, H3, H4, H5 & H6) and bulleted or numbered lists.
- Readability: proper language use with no grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors.
- Meta tags: enticing 140-character meta description and relevant meta keywords.
Focusing on quality content is the most important thing one can do to increase a website’s relevance, and basic audits usually focus on this particular aspect much more than others.
3. Authority
Authority allows websites to remark themselves as credible and highly trustworthy sources. Authority is usually given by links from trusted websites, as well as social signals, which prove that a website is popular among its targeted audience.
A website can earn authority by having a technically compelling and highly relevant website. In theory, other websites are going to link back to your own website if the content you publish is of a high quality and delivers accurate, verifiable information.
Aligning the Pillars with Search Engine Processes
Search engines consist of three processes, each of them handling different aspects of web search. Together, they provide highly relevant and accurate search results that correspond to users’ queries. The three components of a search engine are: the Crawler, the Indexer, and the Query Engine.
1. Crawler
The crawler of a search engine, also referred to as a “spider,” is the process that crawls the World Wide Web to discover new content, find and follow hyperlinks, and retrieve content.
The crawling process starts with a list of URLs, usually those supplied through XML sitemaps. The crawler visits these URLs, identifies other hyperlinks in each page, and adds them to a list of URLs to visit. The process repeats, and the crawler retrieves an increasing number of hyperlinks.
Webmasters have the option to exert measures of control over the crawling process by supplying directives in the robots.txt file, which they obey to. An example of directive is intercepting and redirecting crawlers to another page of your website.
The crawler aligns with the first pillar – technology. By having clean URLs, correct HTTP statuses for each page, an XML sitemap, and proper site structure, spiders can easily crawl your website, so it can be further passed to the indexer.
2. Indexer
The links discovered during the crawling process are passed to the indexer, which analyses them and then assigns individual relevance values for each keyword within the content.
The indexer also compiles link graphs with values and weights that may help with the ranking of each page. Webmasters can also exert control over the indexing process, but only to some degree and through canonicals and robots meta tags. The indexer is the process that corresponds to the relevance pillar – a website that’s properly optimized for both users and search engines become more relevant to specific queries, so they are assigned a higher relevance value.
3. Query Engine
The query engine is that process of a search engine that strives to understand the context and intent of users’ searches and provide the most relevant results. The process retrieves documents (URLs) from the index, applies the ranking values initially set by the indexer, then displays a list of results to the user. This process is also referred to as web query classification.
The types of results (e.g. images, news, local) displayed are determined by the context and intent of the query. A number of factors are considered when search results are shown to the user – these include (but are not limited to) type of device (desktop computer, laptop, tablet, smartphone), user location, and query intent.
The query engine aligns with the authority pillar – the more authoritative and credible a website is, the more relevant it will be for specific queries, so the query engine will show it to the top or close to the top of SERPs.
Final Word
Understanding the correspondences between SEO pillars and processes allows you to gain a better understanding of which process you are actually optimizing for. If you are considering hiring a company that provides SEO services, consider asking them about how they address each pillar of SEO, and how this impacts each process employed by search engines.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1LJYuZ0 via local SEO company
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Kgpctv
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