Search Engine Optimization Explained & Explored

SEO has become such an enigma in recent years, with an increasingly high concentration of publishers aiming to get their content visible atop the major search engines. To boost your sales, conversions, and user engagement, it’s paramount you produce a website that is expertly optimized for search results. To understand the importance of SEO, it’s crucial to know what Google’s search algorithm is looking for. By analyzing these important factors and statistics, you will be able to construct a plan that works best for your brand.

Brief History of Google

It seems that nearly every billion dollar technology business begins in someone’s dorm room. Google started out as a research project by Sergey Brin and Deepa, two PhD candidates at Stanford University in 1996. The goal was to create a website that measured the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, interpreting its link structure in the form of a huge graph. By late 1996, Brin and fellow Stanford student Larry Page had come to a conclusion that would revolutionize search engines and pave the way for the burgeoning digital marketing industry.

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They correctly theorized that the pages with the most links to them from other “highly relevant” web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with a given search. This shattered the previous formula used in early engines like AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!, which displayed search results according to how many times the search term was mentioned on a web page. Brin and Page aptly named their search formula the PageRank algorithm, as Page was a double entendre denoting web page as well as Larry Page’s last name. By the early 2000’s, Google already owned between 65-70% of the search market share. It was being praised by millions for its simple design and innovative search indexing technology.

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How Search Works - The Backlinking Revolution

From the beginning, Google’s ethos has been about rewarding webpages based on their popularity and perceived level of importance. The higher valued websites get ranked near the top of Google’s search, while others get subjugated down towards obscurity. Why is this so important? The majority of users never scroll past the first page of search results (some stats say 80%). What Google’s really done is tell publishers, “there needs to be links from other places leading me back to your site, otherwise you aren’t relevant.” This idea of building backlinks to a website is no longer just a Google concept, it has become the goal of every business’s digital marketing plan.

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Let’s say you’re running a dessert recipe site. Your goal is to be THE authority on dessert recipes, so you ensure that topic specific keywords are prevalent in H1 headers and are bolded in places within the HTML body. You also want to include internal links to improve your site’s user experience (UX) and aid in the indexing of your pages. But this alone isn’t enough to satisfy Google’s algorithm. They want to corroborate you as a viable resource for users by examining how many other dessert recipe related sources have mentioned your content, and how many have produced hyperlinks back to your site. It sounds a bit counterintuitive, because in order to get your content seen by others it helps to have already ranked highly in Google’s search results.

Fear not, if you have the basic SEO formatting strategies down, and the content is of a high quality, you will get rewarded by Google’s many signals.

Emphasis On Content And Links

Today, building backlinks is one of Google’s hundreds (possibly thousands) of signals that they utilize in their search engine’s algorithm. Signals notice various aspects of your webpage and factor them into their final assessment of a site’s value. Although Google plays their cards close to the chest when it comes to divulging these factors, they generalize that “content and links” are the two most important reasons for a site’s SERP (search engine results placement). Even in 2016, these two pieces remain the cornerstone of any website’s SEO strategy.

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SEO vs Social Media Marketing

During Google’s inception in the late 90’s, nobody foresaw the massive social media revolution we’re having today. Now e-commerce sites are reveling over the sheer quantity and accessibility of social media channels, and their potential to drive leads. But despite these interactive resources, you might be surprised to know that the majority of inbound traffic is still produced organically. 

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Search engines remain the #1 driver of traffic to most websites, defeating social media by more than 3-to-1 according to SearchEngineJournal. Why? Social media is more of a passive activity for users (i.e. scrolling through statuses or tweets), whereas consumers who are in search of a specific product are going to ‘Google’ the keywords needed to find it. This isn’t to say that social media lacks importance, but SEO still dominates the marketplace in Google’s eyes.

How To Avoid Getting Reprimanded By Google

No, you won’t literally get arrested by Google for implementing a black hat SEO strategy, but they might punish your site by removing it from the search results. For an active business, that’s financially as bad as serving jail time. It’s fairly easy to avoid these missteps, but it requires patience and confidence in your SEO plan.

Things to avoid include:

• Keyword stuffing - overusing specific keywords on your pages to an inappropriate and nonsensical degree.
• Paying for backlinks - purchasing fake hyperlinks to your pages designed to increase search visibility.
• Cloaking - presenting different content to search algorithms than what is actually displayed on the website.
• Hidden text, or clear text - having text on your pages that is of a clear font, or hidden behind other elements for the sole purpose of boosting search rankings.

Keeping In Mind Desktop AND Mobile Users

This isn’t 2005 anymore. Smartphones are becoming the primary mode of online activity for users of all age groups. In March 2015, the amount of mobile-only users overtook desktop users for the first time, and there’s no turning back. The world of SEO is evolving with new channels to communicate and connect, with a particular focus on ease-of-use, simplifying content to be handled by smaller screen sizes, and using more visuals to appease mobile users on the go.

As we continue into the future of digital marketing, it’s important to be attuned to each new trend, but it’s also crucial to master the basics of search engine optimization. This general principle is unlikely to change.

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