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?
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