[ITS122P] Search Engine Optimization

search engine

is a program that searches the web for sites based on your keyword search terms.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

search engine takes your keyword and returns (blank), with a list of sites it deems relevant or connected to your searched keyword.

spider or web crawler

Web search engines catalog the world wide web by using a

spider or web crawler

These web-crawling robots were created for indexing content; they scan and assess the content on site pages and information archives across the web.

spider

“crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Refers to the process of “optimizing” both the onpage and off- page ranking factors in order to achieve high search engine rankings for targeted search terms.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Refers to the “industry” that has been created regarding using keyword searching as a means of increasing relevant traffic to a website.

Google Algorithm

They determine relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, mostly based on the keywords it contains.

Google Algorithm

They determine “quality” by a number of means, but prominent among those is still the number and quality of other websites that link to your page and your site as a whole

Off-page ranking factors

• Backlinks, Quality Content, Cold outreach, Guest posts

These are being measured by Google elsewhere from your site, and primarily involve backlinks.

On-page ranking factors

• Keyword targeting

• Title and header tags, Meta description, Image alt-text, URL structure

These are mainly related to the keywords and informational quality of your pages.

Technical ranking factors

• Site and page speed

• Usability on mobile

• Internal links

These are also measured on your site, but have more to do with its overall performance as a whole, as opposed to individual pages.

1. Panda (Feb 24, 2011) - These are also measured on your site, but have more to do with its overall performance as a whole, as opposed to individual pages.

2. Penguin (April 24, 2012) - to downrank sites whose backlinks look unnatural

3. Hummingbird (Aug 22, 2013) - helps Google better interpret search queries and provide results that match searcher intent (as opposed to the individual terms within the query

4. Mobile (April 21, 2015) - have shifted the focus from a desktop to a mobile version of your website

5. RankBrain (Oct 26, 2015) - It is a machine learning system that helps Google understand the meaning behind queries and serve best-matching search results in response to those queries.

6. Medic (May 4, 2018) - seemed to disproportionately affect medical websites as well as other websites that have to do with potentially life-altering decisions (finance, law, education).

7. Bert (Oct 22, 2019) - uses natural language processing technology to better understand search queries, interpret text, identify entities and relationships between entities.

8. Core Updates (2017 - present) - Since 2017, there is even less transparency about what those updates are and which parts, of search they are intended to improve.

8 Major Google Algorithm Updates

Pay Per Click (PPC)

• ads appear as “sponsored listings”

• Companies bid on price they are willing to pay “per click”

• Typically have very good tracking tools and statistics

• Ability to control ad text

• Can set budgets and spending limits

• Instant traffic

• Complete control

• No updates to worry about

• Brand domination

• Targeting options

Pros of Pay Per Click

• Expense

• Requires extensive testing

• Needs constant optimizing

Cons of Pay Per Click

• Credibility and exposure

• ROI potential

• Visibility across multiple search engines

Pros of Organic SEO

• Results are not instant

• Competition

• Vulnerable to updates

Cons of Organic SEO