A Primer on Search Engine Optimization

The most important thing to remember about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that search engines are not human beings. If you project your usual thinking into this process you will never get on track with effective SEO. Search engines are text- and link-driven, while humans process input in a number of ways (visual, aural, etc.). One of the problems is the anthropomorphic view of computers (seeing them as human-like) that the popular culture has promoted on TV, in movies and so on. On the other hand, technology does seem like magic to many people, and technological progress seems to be accelerating. Perhaps it seems so because it really is so. Consider: It took fewer than 70 years to get from man's first powered flight of a few seconds' duration to the moon landing.

Computer technology has advanced quickly, too, and continues to do so, but search engines are not intelligent, perceptive or discerning. They do not know what a great design is or what the story is in a video clip. They simply traverse the Web (which is called crawling) and take note of particular items on sites, predominantly text, to develop a description of a page's content and purpose. This is still a bit of a shallow definition, but we will flesh it out with a brief overview of how search engines combine numerous tasks (crawling, processing, indexing, determining relevance) to produce a search result. Thus, a primer on search engine optimization is, most importantly, a way for you to understand how those engines work. When you know that, you can move to the next steps of tailoring your sites (text and other content) for best effect.

Search engine optimization is a challenge to even the best SEO experts, as unknown and shifting variables have a way of being confounding and make it hard to assess the effect of new strategies and other SEO maneuvers. You have heard the old saw about how hard it is to hit a moving target, right? Consider the complexity involved in trying to hit millions of them.

First things first

Search engines, as has been pointed out, crawl the Web to find everything they can. The software that does this is called a spider or crawler, or a bot (from the word robot) like Googlebot. The spiders index everything they encounter as they essentially play connect-the-dots and follow links from page to page. When you consider that Google has indexed almost 30 billion distinct Web pages (as of August 2010), you can see that the work is never-ending. You should also consider the fact that several reports, including one from cloud security firm Zscaler in February 2010, indicate that a large but hard-to-pinpoint percentage of sites are never visited at all, or not enough to register.

Indexing and request processing

After crawling comes the indexing of content, which becomes part of a gargantuan database. The indexing process identifies words and expressions that describe pages succinctly and accurately, then assign specific keywords to those pages. Some index functions do not get it right the first time, but that is where the O (for Optimization) in SEO comes into play. If you properly optimize your page in accordance with a thorough understanding of the SEO process, you can actually assist the search engines in the classification of your site's pages. This is important for attaining higher rankings.

The search engines process requests by comparing a search string with a database full of indexed pages. In real life, there will not be one or two pages with that search string, but likely millions of them. Therefore, search engine software needs tools by which it can calculate relevance and present you with useful results. The term for the portions of the software that handle the calculation process is algorithm. Algorithms turn mountains of possibilities into orderly results that range from more- to less-relevant vis-à-vis the search request.

Algorithms explained

There are many kinds of algorithms used to calculate relevance, and they differ, sometimes a little but often quite a bit. They do share common features, however, and will assign different levels of importance to such common factors as content, keywords, related keywords, titles, and links. This is why the different search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) yield different search results for the exact same search terms. The major search engines just mentioned also change their algorithms from time to time, so if staying at the top of the rankings is important to you, you will need to continuously adapt and update your pages to conform to the latest algorithms.

Bottom line

Obviously, the more important it is for your business to score high rankings, the more likely it is that your site will be in a constant state of revision. SEO, in other words, becomes a permanent maintenance task, as important as any other core function of your business. Now that you have a basic foundation of knowledge about SEO, you can begin to study the various ways and means of achieving the desired results with search engines. It is a job that is never done, with rules and rationales changing seemingly every nanosecond, but it is a job that is fast becoming a requirement for doing business in a networked world.