You're at the perfect place if you want to study SEO.
On our SEO Blog and YouTube channel, we have produced a ton of free educational resources throughout the years, assisting millions of users in increasing the organic traffic to their websites.
However, the problem with these sites is the disorganized nature of their material. The route to being knowledgeable about SEO is unclear.
This is the reason we wrote this manual. This page is your entryway to SEO expertise, whether you're just starting out or already know the fundamentals.
SEO: What is it?
Growing a website's traffic through natural search results is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It entails activities including technical audits, content production, link building, and keyword research.
The SEO Beginner's Guide
You just need these six chapters to establish a solid foundation in SEO expertise and begin to rank better on Google. Each chapter includes connections to several resources for additional learning if you wish to go further.
Chapter 1: How to Use Search Engines
Web crawlers are used by search engines to index billions of pages. Crawlers, sometimes referred to as spiders or bots, search the internet for new pages by clicking on links. After that, these pages are placed to an index from which search engines subsequently get results.
If you're conducting SEO, it's imperative that you comprehend how search engines work. After all, it's hard to optimize for something if you don't understand how it operates.
Let's start by discussing the nature of search engines, their purpose, and how they generate revenue.
How do search engines work?
Searchable databases of web material are search engines. They consist of two primary components:
Search Engine: a digital repository for knowledge about websites.
Search Engine (s): computer program(s) responsible for matching search index results.
What do search engines hope to accomplish?
Every search engine strives to give consumers the finest, most pertinent results. They acquire market share in part because of this.
How are search engines funded?
Search engine results come in two varieties:
Natural outcomes from the search index. You can't buy your way in here.
Advertisements' compensated outcomes. For being here, you can pay.
The advertiser compensates the search engine every time someone clicks on a sponsored search result. Market share is important because of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. More users translate into more ad clicks and money.
Chapter 2: How search engine indexes are created
The advertiser compensates the search engine every time someone clicks on a sponsored search result. Market share is important because of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. More users translate into more ad clicks and money.
Building a search index is a procedure that is unique to each search engine. An abbreviated description of Google's procedure may be seen below.
Let's dissect it
Everything starts with a list of known URLs. Google finds them in a variety of ways, but the three most popular are as follows:
From connections back. There are hundreds of billions of websites in Google's index. Google can locate a new page from a known page if someone connects to it from there.
Website maps. Sitemaps let Google know which files and pages on your website you believe to be crucial. From submissions of URLs. Site owners may ask Google to crawl certain URLs using Google Search Console.
Crawling
A computer program called a spider accesses and downloads well-known URLs while it crawls. Googlebot is Google's web crawler.
Processing and Output
Google processes web pages to comprehend and extract important data. It must render the page to accomplish this, which entails running the website's code to comprehend how it appears to people.
Nobody except Google is fully aware of this procedure. But it makes no difference. We just truly need to be aware that it entails storing material for indexing and extracting links from links.
Indexing
The process of indexing involves adding processed data from pages that have been crawled to the search index.
When using a search engine, you search the search index. It is crucial to get indexed in popular search engines like Google and Bing for this reason. Unless you are listed in the index, users cannot locate you.
Chapter 3: How Search Engine Results are Ranked
The initial piece of the puzzle merely consists of finding, crawling, and indexing content. When a user searches, search engines also require a means to prioritize related results. Search algorithms' role in this is to do this.
Search algorithms: what are they?
Algorithms used in search are used to compare and rank relevant results from the index. Google’s algorithms consider a variety of variables.
Important Google ranking elements
Google hasn't made all its ranking factor’s public, so no one is aware of them. But we do know a few significant ones. Let's examine some of them.
Backlinks
Backlinks are connections between pages on different websites. They are among the key ranking criteria used by Google. In our analysis of more than a billion pages, we likely saw a substantial correlation between connecting domains and organic traffic as a result.
But it's not just about quantity. Quality also counts. It's common for pages with a few high-quality connections to rank higher than those with numerous low-quality links.
Relevance
The value of a particular result to the searcher is its relevance. Google offers a variety of techniques to figure this out. It initially looks for web pages with the same terms as the search query. It also examines interaction data to see whether other people found the outcome beneficial.
Freshness
Freshness is a ranking element that depends on the query. It is more effective for queries that want recent results. This explains why "new Netflix series" appears at the top of the search results page, but "how to solve a Rubik's cube" does not.
Website Speed
On both desktop and mobile, page speed affects rankings. However, rather of being a good ranking element, it is more so. This is so that it has a negative impact on the pages that load the slowest rather than a favorable impact on those that load extremely quickly.
Mobile Friendliness
Since Google switched to mobile-first indexing in 2019, mobile friendliness has become a ranking consideration for both desktop and mobile websites.
Chapter 4: Exactly how search engines customize results
Each user's search results are customized by Google. Your location, language, and search history are used in this process. [9] Let's examine these points in more detail.
Location
Google personalizes the results for queries with a local focus based on your location. Because of this, every result for "Italian restaurant" is related to or comes from a nearby eatery. Google is aware that you probably won't fly halfway across the world for lunch.
Language
Google is aware that it is useless to display English results to Spanish-speaking consumers. It gives translated versions of material (if available) a higher ranking to users who speak other languages for this reason.
Search Results
Google keeps track of your activities and travel destinations to provide you with a more individualized search experience.
Although you have the option to decline, most individuals do not.
Key conclusions
Index and algorithms make up the two basic components of a search engine.
It explores well-known pages and follows links to discover new ones to develop its index.
The best, most pertinent results are what search engines are designed to produce.
The quality of search results is crucial for increasing market share.
Nobody is aware of all of Google's organic results ranking variables.
Relevance, freshness, and backlinks are important ranking considerations.
Based on your location, language, and search history, Google customizes its results.
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Salty Red Dog Marketing, LLC is a marketing agency in Red Bank, NJ, Westport, CT, and everywhere in between. We service businesses with marketing strategies, digital marketing, social media, and consultations.
Contact: info@saltyreddogmarketing.com
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