SEO Tutorial – What is search engine optimization?

- Search engine optimization is the process
of making improvements on and off your website
in order to gain more exposure in search engine results.
And that means more visitors finding you
for the right reasons.
But before we begin, let's take a step back
and understand the goals of the search engines themselves.
Search engines are really
just trying to find and understand
all the content out there on the internet,
and then quickly deliver relevant
and authoritative content
that is ultimately useful to their users.
First, let's talk about relevance.
When a user searches on something like "California travel"
search engines will analyze
all the webpages they've ever visited
and pick out the pages that they believe
are the most relevant to the term "California travel".
They determine this by evaluating web content
around lots of different factors,
including how that content is written,
how it's implemented in code,
and how other websites around the internet
are linking to it.
All this information is then stuffed
into a very big, very complex,
and very proprietary index.
Then in just a fraction of a second,
the search engine is able to use
its complex algorithms to rank and return
all of those webpages right back to the user.
And search engines make a very clear distinction
between content that's about "California travel"
versus content relevant to other phrases
like "California resorts"
or something like beach getaway.
Search engines are able to understand quite a bit
about semantic and thematic connections
between words and concepts.
Let's take another example of search query, dog crates.
Obviously, a search engine knows
that pages selling dog crates
are extremely relevant to that search query.
But it's also figured out
that websites about pet carriers are very relevant too,
and it knows their website
promoting things like pet food or dog toys
might also be relevant to the search query,
just to a lesser extent.
Next, let's talk about authority.
Basically, this means that out there
on the largely lawless worldwide web
where anyone can post anything,
can your content be trusted
so that the search engines
would want to show it to their users?
One very common way
that search engines determine authority
is by evaluating what other websites have to say
about a piece of content.
This can be measured through links
pointing to that content around the web,
references, reviews, and more.
You can think of links as a vote on the internet.
A webpage linking to your website
is just like saying,
"Hey, I trust your content enough
that I'm willing to reference your page
and even send my traffic to your site."
This vote of trust is found and stored by search engines
as they they crawl and index
all the pages of the internet.
But it's important to know
that this isn't just a popularity contest.
Search engines place an emphasis
on the quality and relevance of a link.
For example, a search engine
is more likely to trust a link
if it comes from a well respected
or industry related site,
like an industry leading blog
or nonprofit or government agency
involved in your field of work.
If you were the owner of a California travel website,
you might have links from travel review sites
or local chambers of commerce
or things like local travel bureaus.
All of that is pretty relevant.
But a link coming from a sketchy domain
that has nothing to do with you
right next to some text that says,
"I'll link to anything you want for five bucks,"
isn't going to be worth much.
So you might think of this whole system
as a weighted democracy
where some votes are worth more than others.
Understanding how important
both relevance and authority are to a search engine
will help you to ultimately improve these factors,
leading to better search engine exposure
and more visits to your own content.
(upbeat music)