What is SEO?
SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a marketing strategy that concentrates on the purpose of increasing visibility in organic search engine results for relevant user search queries. When implemented correctly, SEO helps to deliver increased rankings, traffic and brand awareness in search engines that, in turn, can help to drive conversions for identified business goals. SEO can be a complex discipline, which requires an awareness of multiple factors that affect the way in which your website is understood and processed by search engines. A good starting point for a webmaster is to be mindful of Google’s mission statement:
“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Adhering to this mission statement should form the key foundation of any webmaster’s SEO strategy.
Why does your site require SEO?
Many think that simply designing a good-looking website is enough, that Search Engines are so clever that they are able to automatically understand what the website is about without needing outside input or direction. This belief can cost companies a lot of money in lost potential traffic and business. While many inroads have been made to make search engines more efficient and intelligent in their crawling of the internet and the delivery of quality results to user’s search queries they still require assistance.
Some limitations of search engines include aspects such as failing to accurately match search queries to content and facing issues in crawling sites that have poor internal linking or duplicate pages, among other issues. This is where search engine optimization provides its’ key applications, in ensuring that websites are designed with search engines in mind and that the website maintains the relevance and quality of its content to ensure it serves the target audience’s search queries.
The Commercial Motivation
When you consider the sheer size of the search market, the importance of SEO becomes vital. At Google’s latest yearly conference, it was mentioned that the search company handles “trillions of searches a year”.
For the US search market alone, ComScore had the following market figures from the use of search engines in March 2015:
- Google held a 64.4% share of the search market, followed by Bing (20.1%) and Yahoo with 12.7%. Ask Network accounted for 1.8% and AOL, Inc for 1.1% respectively.
- 18.9 billion explicit core searches were conducted in March, with Google ranked first at 12.1 billion searches. Microsoft ranked second with 3.8 billion searches, followed by Yahoo Sites with 2.4 billion, Ask Network with 332 million and AOL, Inc. with 203 million.
These figures for the US search market are important because while Google has the largest share, there is still a significant share being made up from competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo that ought to be considered for any search marketing strategy.
Is Your Site on Google?
You can do a quick test to see if your site is being indexed and is visible on Google, by using a site:yoursiteURL search function on Google. If no results are retrieved, as our example below illustrates, it might be time to consider an SEO specialist to help.
What does SEO affect?
SEO affects organic, non-paid, results in search engine result pages. These results are displayed clearly in the screenshot below for our example search query : “houston montrose apartments”. Organic results affected by search engine optimization are highlighted in green and paid search results are highlighted in red.
How do search engines work?
Search engines are tasked with matching users’ search queries to the most relevant and authoritative content that they have stored away in their index.
Consider the web a vast library and your website as just one of many books that offer content on a particular topic. When you enter a library, you make use of categories to find the most relevant books for your information needs. Without that categorization, you would be unable to efficiently find the book that you needed. Search engines operate on a similar principle, having to serve users that expect to quickly find the information they need to answer their search queries.
Search engines crawl the web, organizing the documents it discovers by their content and other search factors, which they store in an index to call upon when a user makes a search query. The first goal for your website would be to match your content to users that would need the information contained within it. Without search engines, your website would just remain as one of the thousands, if not millions of unorganized and uncategorized websites that have no means of being found by the users that need them.
How is your website discovered?
Search engines use custom software known as “crawlers” to discover publicly available content on the web. These crawlers use a mixture of past crawls and user-submitted “sitemaps” to start off their journey of discovering content and travel through links to access new content.
The Role of Algorithms
Search algorithms help make the organization of web pages possible by processing signals from these web pages to evaluate them in relation to answering a user’s search query. This helps to ensure that only the best and most relevant web pages are served as results to users. There are over 200 unique “ranking signals” that search engines such as Google take into account.
To keep up with the changing nature of user requirements and the technology that drives search, Search engines make regular updates and improvements to their algorithms. Google, in particular, have made several key advances in their algorithm that have served to improve their search product and legitimized the search marketing industry itself.
Panda (2011) – an update to Google’s search algorithm that sought to filter out low-quality sites and thin-content sites from high ranking positions in the search results. This update was pivotal in propelling content marketing to one of the key disciplines for SEO
Penguin (2012) – an algorithm update that aimed to prevent sites that were violating Google’s webmaster guidelines for spam with bad quality link profiles from ranking well in search results. The Penguin algorithm update was key to regulating an industry that often sought to manipulate the algorithm, as opposed to providing quality content and web pages, to rank well in search results.
Google’s early algorithm looked at links pointing to a website as an indicator of popularity and thus, quality. As a result, webmasters would engage in “black-hat SEO methods” that artificially inflated the number of links pointing to their web pages. Penguin helped the algorithm analyze links for quality as opposed to just sheer quantity
Hummingbird (2013) – was a new search algorithm that was released by Google with the means to better understand the context behind words in search queries. This enabled Google to better understand the intent behind users’ search queries and serve them more relevant results.
Hummingbird helped to change the course of search marketers who were mindlessly pushing more content in their pages after the Panda update in 2011 without thinking about the quality of their content or the intent behind their users’ search queries.
Hummingbird also served as the first stepping stone towards the future of SEO with Voice Search as Google was able to understand conversational search queries.
The Changing Face of SEO
Discussing the results which SEO effects and the various search algorithm wouldn’t be complete without discussing the changing landscape of the search results themselves. Gone are the days that websites would be competing to be shown as one of the ten blue links on the search result pages. Over time, Google has added more functionality and layout improvements to its search results from extended site links and map listings to quick answers that directly address the information which the user is seeking to find.
To help illustrate just how much the landscape of search results have changed and the added features which are now being displayed, I have broken down the search results for the query: “Houston Dynamo”.
- Live Sports Event Scores
- Knowledge graph for entity-based search query
- Sitelinks
- Twitter feed
- Social Media Profiles
- Map listings for entity that was searched for
- Latest “In the news” articles
In this example for “Houston Dynamo”, Google is adhering to its mission statement by providing relevant and useful results to the user. A user searching for a particular sports team is much more likely to be interested in monitoring the scores of games, latest news and tweets surrounding their team, and ways to travel to the game. The search also reveals that there is limited space for traditional organic search listings and, subsequently, much more thought needs to be placed on producing content that satisfies the different types of content users are wishing to see from their queries.
As one can tell from reading through this short introduction, SEO is a complex and challenging field for marketers. Change is constant, algorithm updates are frequent and technology advances the search market at a fast pace. In the midst of all this change, The key thing to always keep in mind is that the purpose is always the same – referring to Google’s mission statement: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. By continuing to keep the user in mind, as Google does, you should always find success in the search market.