Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique to ensure that a site is reachable to a search engine and improves the chances to be easily found. It is a cluster of different strategies and tactics to obtain a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine [SERP] by increasing the number of visitors to a website. SEO is essential for directing more traffic towards a website. Higher organic reach rank results in the greater chance that the site will be found by more users. All search engines use a three phase approach to managing and ranking websites and pages.
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Results
The 3 phases of SEO
First, through web crawling, the search engines can find out what is posted on the World Wide Web. It is known by several other variants such as robots, spiders or web crawlers. This method gives a way to create the index by using the crawler algorithm to locate all information placed on the internet.
The Second step is indexing. A crawler stores the copy of a web page and that is returned and stored in the data centre. Thus, the “index” is the warehouse of web pages.
The third and last phase is where the search engine spiders take the keywords and match them to the information on their index. After this, the most relevant information is provided within seconds. This is known as the algorithm. Despite being complex and lengthy equations, algorithms helps in finding what one is looking for, ranking results in order of the relevance to the search term. It should be noted that the search engines keep algorithms safely guarded against other parties and competitors.
Google Updates and How to Survive Them
Talking of algorithms, Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times each year. It occasionally pulls out a “major” algorithmic update (such as Google Panda and Google Penguin), that have a large affect on search results, while “minor” changes occur quite often. It is important for search marketers to know the dates of these Google updates, as they can help explain changes in rankings and organic website traffic and ultimately improve SEO.
Protection against Google Updates
In order to avoid being penalized, website owners should provide content for readers which are easy and useful. Google itself will provide the relevant content to search engine users by doing its job.
Tips to Safeguard
- Pages must be optimized for Mobile. If they aren’t, you need a web developer to address that.
- Pages with less than 400 words are at risk of being penalized. So increase your word count.
- Don’t overdo keywords. Maintain it as natural and organic search phrases.
- Target the readers and not the search bots.
- Provide simple and plain value added content.
It is important to build three important key principles:
1. Trust
Google’s trust factor relies on a combination of many factors. The blogs will be ranked higher on specific Google searches if it is a trustful site. So create good quality content and get high quality links to develop off-page trust. Link the site to social accounts especially Facebook as it strengthen the chances to gain Google’s trust. Remember that increasing trust is a long process, even in the virtual world. Don’t deviate from the path as Google keeps untrustworthy websites out of reach,
2. Authority
Authority is the qualitative measure which strengthens the overall visibility and ranking of a website, A core tactic for SEO experts is to increase authority. Additional aspects of authority are informative content the building of effective, high quality links. But Authority cannot single handedly guarantee search visibility.
Authority is based on 2 Factors
Page Authority:
Page Authority is a metric that predicts how well a web page ranks on the search engine result page. Higher page authority increases the ranking potential of a web page.
Domain Authority:
Domain Authority is a search engine ranking factors based on the popularity, size and age of the domain. The Domain Authority of all pages in a website is same.
The key to becoming prominent in SERPs and claiming a higher ranking, is by getting a good number of high quality backlinks to the site. This will increase the trust flow. Although it is also important that citation flow increases. Trust Flow includes qualitative backlinks, while Citation flow includes all backlinks. Thus, both of them point towards the domain. Google therefore, takes into account the contextual relevance of a site and provide higher rankings based upon backlinks from trusted sites.
Relevancy based on 2 Factors
Citation Flow:
It is a ranking factor that refers to the popularity of a link. This ranking factor considers the quantity of links as opposed to the quality. The more links to a website, the higher the citation flow.
Trust Rank
It is a metric that considers the quality of a link as a ranking factor. It analyses the quality of the link to separate useful Webpages from spam semi-automatically.
Over To You
We hope you’ve found this article helpful. If you’d like to add anything or discuss aspects of this article, please leave your comments, below.
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Mandeep Singh
Latest posts by Mandeep Singh (see all)
- 3 Powerful Pillars of SEO: Authority, Trust & Relevance - June 6, 2017