Use this link to see all the posts in this series: Do-It-Yourself SEO. 

Think Like a Search Engine

The place to begin learning SEO is to start thinking like a search engine.  Well, search engines don’t really think, and we don’t know how they’re programmed down to the last detail.  If the search engines published their complete algorithm for ranking sites, the Black Hat folks would go even crazier finding ways to trick the system.

But, all that aside, here’s a very high level overview of how search engines work.  And, keep in mind that the assumption for the rest of this series is that your website meets the minimum requirements for being search engine friendly.

If you’re not sure what those are, check out the series on Real Estate Website Content Mistakes.

A Search Engine’s Goal:  Satisfying Their Customers

Everyone has customers – even search engines.  For a search engine, their customer is the person who types a search phrase into their search field.  The search engine wants to provide the best list of web pages that offer the most in-depth and accurate information on the keyword phrase that has been entered.

And, that is a pretty aggressive goal.  You know from using search engines yourself that there can be anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of web pages that are listed for a particular search term.  So, how does a search engine possibly figure out which pages to include in a list, and what order to put them in?

Spiders Crawl

A search engine couldn’t possibly decide how to list sites for a search term the instant someone types it in.  The search engines figure all that out in advance using their own Spiders or Bots to crawl the Internet.

A Spider or Bot is simply a program that “crawls” around the Internet reading every web page it comes across.  Spiders are very sophisticated programs.  For example, they can read the source code for your web page and figure out if there are words on the page that use the same color as the background of your site.  If they did find something like that, they’d know that you’re trying to hide text from visitors.

Another term you might come across is Latent semantic indexing, or LSI.  Search engines use this type of indexing to various degrees.  Using LSI, the search engines take note, not only of words that appear to be important on a web page, but also whether the content contains related words.

For example, if you wrote a web page about calendars and put the words “real estate” in areas significant to the search engines, that page wouldn’t rank well for the term “real estate”.  Search engines know enough to expect that if you were really writing about real estate, the page would also contain words like homes, condos, home buyer/buying, home seller/selling, etc.

Spiders read the content of web pages, and they follow any links to other pages that they find.  That’s why it is important to use menus that can be read by the search engines.  And, those links at the bottom of most web pages are handy for visitors, but they also provide the Spiders with another reason to visit all the pages on a website.

Spiders from each of the search engines report back with all they’ve learned from crawling web pages on the Internet, and the search engine applies its ranking algorithm to that information to determine how to respond to searches done by their customers.

How Search Engines Find Your Web Pages

You can submit your website to search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.  And, if you visit those pages, you’ll notice that they all say that their Spiders generally find all web pages without your submission.  Just something to keep in mind the next time you read that repeatedly submitting your site to the major search engines is necessary.

The most effective way to be found by the search engines is when a link on another website leads to one of your web pages.  The more often the Spiders end up on your website as they crawl the Internet, the better.

What Search Engines Look For

Search engine algorithms are complex and ever-changing things.  In a nutshell, though, here are the basic things that a search engine looks for in order to rank a site well:

1.  Information-Rich Websites – Search engines figure that the more information your site offers on a subject, the more opportunity their customers will have to find what they’re looking for.  So, search engines like websites that have lots of pages that contain original content.

2.  Relevance – Search engines want to see that the content of a page focuses on a specific topic.  They want to see that your Page Title, Meta Tags, and content all share relevance.  They also like it when multiple pages on your site share relevance.

3.  Popularity – Search engines gauge the popularity of your site based on how many links from other websites lead to yours.  That’s why incoming links to your site are so important. 

The search engines consider each incoming link to your site as a “vote” for your website.  For example, if the search engines discover that many related websites “vote” for your site for terms related to Atlanta real estate, they will figure that your site must be an authority on Atlanta real estate.

Just keep in mind that a lot of links from gambling sites, or sites about warts, don’t do you any good.  The more authority a site that links to yours has on a related topic (in this case real estate), the more important the search engines will think you are.

4.  Fresh Content – Not only do search engines look for original content, but they also value information that is updated regularly.

This is not even close to being an exhaustive list of the things search engines use to rank websites.  Certainly the age of a domain name is important, the older the better.  The search engines even notice when your domain name expires – names that are registered for many years are considered more stable.

And, there is quite a long list of other factors that are considered.  But, these basics give you an overview of the key issues.