You don’t have to understand the detail of how the search engines work. In actual fact, the search engines won’t let you know exactly how they work, but there are some simple principles that are good to understand. The most important of which is the concept of relevance.
All of the search engines provide a valuable service by returning search results that are highly relevant. The most relevant sites appear on page one. It may sound obvious but relevance is crucial. Sites don’t buy their way to the first page. They are there because they are the most relevant. If your site is to be found, it has to be relevant to what people are search for. But how do you make your site relevant? Your content is what it is – how can it be made more relevant? Relevant to what exactly? Understanding the answers to these questions is one of the fundamentals to search engine optimisation. In a separate lesson, we’ll show you how to get ranked higher in the search engines but for the time being, relevance is the important concept.
All of the search engines use keywords to index the internet. They examine every page on the internet and index each page in the same way that a book is indexed. If you type “Harry Potter” into Google, Google will show you all of the pages where that phrase or keyword appears with the most relevant at the top. The most relevant are the sites that are most well established, with the most high quality pages referring to Harry Potter with the most links to it from other sites about Harry Potter. That is what searchers are looking for. That is likely give the most relevant results.
A site that has poor quality content, for example merely repeat the phrase “Harry Potter” will not appear highly ranked. Neither will a page rank highly if it is very new or has no links to it from other relevant sites. The search engines are clever enough to know that that is not what internet users are looking for.
Watch this great video from Google to understand how they deliver search results
To rank highly within the search engines results, your site must have many quality pages, many quality links to it and be well established. Sounds like a tall order? It is. No one said it would be easy. But don’t despair, there are ways of getting some results quickly.
The SEO Lesson
There are only two things that you need to rank highly in the search engine pages and gain many visitors – lots of quality content and lots of links to your site. That all. There are no shortcuts.
But remember, rank is relative. Being in the top 10% of 1 million search result means you could be be on page 100. Being bottom of a list of 6 means you’re on page 1! But that’s what the next fundamentals lesson is about.
The next Fundamentals of SEO Lesson is Lesson 3: Pond Size
