Google Marketing SEO– Intro to SEO
Google and SEO
What is search engine optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves making Web pages more search engine friendly to promote them as the most relevant solutions for the search engines' users.
The improvements can mean the difference between achieving top rankings, which can result in thousands of monthly visitors, and being lost in oblivion.
Why is search engine optimization important?
Search engine optimization is basically about following search engine rules. If your Web page fits the criterias that a search engine considers the most important factors in terms of relevance, then it will reward you with a top ranking.
Search engine optimizers simply modify Web pages to fit these criterias. This gives the Web pages a better chance of being selected by the search engines as the most relevant page for the search query.
The importance of keyword research
The Internet is basically a massive disorganized library. Search engines are like librarians. They both try to organize the content, so that people can find what they're looking for without too much effort.
With books, librarians have the benefit of bibliographic databases and the information on the book covers to help them organize their library.
Search engines don't have such a luxury. There aren't databases of every single Web page ever created. The Internet is just too big. There's too much information to index.
The only way a search engine can try to organize the mass of information available on the Internet is by the use of keywords and links.
It makes sense to think that if a Web page contains enough keywords related to a certain topic, it should be relevant to a search for information on that particular topic.
So part of the search engine optimization specialist's job is to make sure the Web pages target the keywords that people search for when looking for products, services or information related to what the Web page offers.
The variety of keywords used to search for the same product, service or information is quite staggering.
For example, here are the most popular keyword phrases used by people searching for information on search engine optimization:
search engine optimization
search engine ranking
search engine optimisation (notice the English - as opposed to American - spelling of optimization?)
search engine placement
website optimisation
search engine positioning
web site optimization (notice a space between "web site?")
high search engine ranking
web page optimisation
search engine promotion
top search engine ranking
high search engine rankings
search engine rankings
better search engine placement
web site optimisation
high search engine placement
search engines optimization
website optimization
search engine optimizations (notice the "s" at the end of optimization?)
high search engine positioning
engine optimization resources
You notice how many different variations people use to search for information on the same topic?
The fact is, unless a page contains all of the keywords in a search query, then it will have very little of appearing at the top of the rankings.
Before Web pages can be optimized, you must conduct research to determine which keywords to target. This involves finding targeted keywords, determining their popularity, assessing the amount of competition, and then deciding which keywords to use in your Web pages.
Fortunately, there are tools to help you find out what people are really searching for. You will find these tools listed as SEO software products.
Goggle PageRank™ 101
- PageRank™ is Google's proprietary system for ranking web pages according to importance. PageRank (PR from now on) is a grade (on a scale from one to ten) that Google gives a page after performing a series of elaborate calculations (Google's PageRank algorithm) that take into account the page's content, and the number and quality of pages linking to it.
In a nutshell, the more inbound links a web page has, coming from pages that (a) have a high PR and (b) feature similar or complementary content, the higher its PR will be. The second condition is very important, since a link from a high PR soccer page to a dog grooming page is unlikely to result in any PR benefit for the dog grooming page.
The closer a web page gets to a PR of 10, the higher its importance. A PageRank of 4 or 5 is considered good. Very few pages attain a PR of 10 (among those few are Yahoo! and Google itself). Although nobody knows for a fact, it is widely believed that PageRank is determined using a logarithmic grading scale instead of a linear one. What this means in layman's terms is that it is much more difficult for a web page to move from a PR of 6 to a PR of 7, than it is to move from a PR of 1 to PR of 2.
PageRank is used by Google to determine the position of a page in the search results after a query. For example, if you search for 'Italian Food', Google will first find all the pages relevant to that topic, and then will rank them based on their PR. Given equal relevance, those with a higher PR will be displayed first.
PageRank is a vital piece of statistics to track the progress of your search engine optimization strategy. By checking the PR of your pages frequently, you will be able to tell if your SEO efforts are paying off.
Aside from utilizing PR to analyze your own pages, you can also use it to determine the relative importance of other web pages. This will come in handy when conducting a link exchange campaign. Since Google weighs the quality of the pages linking to you very heavily, you want to solicit link exchanges with pages that in turn have a high PageRank.
To be able to see the PageRank of a web page, you have to download the Google toolbar, a free plug-in that works with your web browser. The Google toolbar provides you with a PageRank indicator that automatically shows you the PageRank of the page you are viewing. This is how the PageRank indicator looks in the Google toolbar (the yellow textbox that spells out the page's PR will pop up automatically when you place your cursor over the green PR bar):
I hope that the definitions of what makes up SEO and the full disclosure of googles proprietary system of web page grading has helped to make you a savvy and productive website optimizer.
Thank you to Kate Gordon for this “Google Marketing SEO” article.
