Search Engine Optimization Basics

Google is the preeminent Web search engine today, and although their indexing algorithm is very similar overall to what it was in 1998, it is much more complex. The degree of sophistication however, is not visible to the average web site owner or marketing manager. This can make search engine optimization a mysterious business since even expert SEOs have difficulty explaining the various factors and how they're calculated.

No recent documentation on Google's algorithm has been published, however, those of who have been practicing SEO for the last ten years have lived and grown with the changes that have occurred. From the changes in link popularity to semantic analysis to link reputation and TrustRank, Bay Street SEO has collected a great deal of information through practice and testing. This information allows us to build sites that search engines love. Our development of unique content for users and search engines is a deliverable that few SEOs will offer. It's hard work but this is the content that search engines want.

This is Matt Cutts, the lead engineer at Google discussing the topic of SEO for Google. He encourages moderation in SEO of course and doesn't refer to sophisticated optimization techniques. This is just basic stuff.

How Does Google Work?

Google is primarily a search service. The company uses what are called search robots to collect web pages and other documents for storage in its catalog of web pages. Currently it has indexed billions of documents of various types. A search robot (Googlebot) is actually a number of robots (software) that comb the web, following hyperlinks and collecting everything they find. Robots are often called spiders or crawlers by webmasters and search engine marketing people. They're actually a computer with a router and a software program. They communicate with thousands of Web servers across the world.

Basically, a search engine is a number of computers transfering data that is stored on various hard drives and disk media. Googlebot requests pages and most servers accept the request and return the requested pages. Other servers, perhaps private computers may ignore the request, therefore Google does not contain links to all the documents on all the world's computers. It contains just a portion. Those that aren't accessible in the fashion that Google prefers may get indexed, but won't rank or be assigned PageRank. PageRank is a numerical value assigned to a page, to give it an estimate of value or importance. PageRank is calculated much more specifically now. Recently Google has downgraded the pagerank of many Web sites and their pages. These changes can affect rankings and overall traffic from Google.

Altogether, Google has many gigabytes of information stored which is processed and returned to searchers by a huge army of thousands of Web servers. Google handles billions of search requests and must have that many servers to handle the demand. That's what makes Google so amazing. It responds to our requests so fast sometimes that we don't even see the web page in front of us change!

How Google Does It

Google needs to be able to sort all the data in its index quickly and effectively and it does that with a type of database query program. This program actually creates what's called an index of the documents. This way, it sort of knows where the documents are before it even searches. To sort all the documents with the words and hyperlinks in them, the query program is set to look for some things more than others. This is called a search engine algorithm.

Google, like most search engines, uses a sort of popularity vote system to rank Web pages and Web sites. Those sites with lots of links to them will tend to be ranked highly because they're popular to many web site owners. Some of those sites may not be quite on topic however, so the program has further criteria it uses to get to the best pages that are most relevant to the searcher who has typed in some keywords in the search box.

High Google rankings are achieved when they are on the keyword topic the searcher has typed in. If the search is for Google, the search engine returns millions of documents that are about Google. These pages may have the word Google in them, or some of the sites that link to these pages, suggest that these pages are about Google as in this example: Google search engine.

For top flight Google search engine optimization services, call Bay Street SEO.