The Fundamentals of SEO
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Lessons
A Definition of SEO
Why optimise for Google?
So why optimise for Google? A company called comScore regularly tracks search engine usage. Based on the latest 2013 data, Google accounted for 66.9% of all web searches. If you’re…
What does a search engine results page look like?
So now we have context of what’s going on in the background. But what should you expect to see when entering a search query. From search engine to search engine…
Domain name impact on search
As frustrating as it may be, one core factor that plays a part is your domain name. Particularly if the domain name contains a relevant Partial Match or Exact Match…
Content & it’s impact on rankings
Is the content on your website relevant to what your customers are looking for? Google doesn’t want keyword-stuffed content that you’ve paid $5 for (though that might have worked in…
Brand signals and impact on search
Brand is a big one. It’s all about the genuine stuff that people are saying about your business and website on the internet. Google understands the sentiment around what’s being…
Page Speed
A rapid loading time is important, as it ties into Google’s ethos of a website always being about the user-experience. If your site loads at warp speed, then it’s enhancing…
Geography & location ranking factors
As an internet user, where you are and where you’re searching from is becoming key in defining what results you’re shown. In the past, when you Googled terms like “gym”,…
Social Media Exposure and Signals
Since the announcement of Google Authorship social signals have had a much larger effect than what experts thought. Basically, the more exposure your brand, product or blog post has, the…
Site Authority & it’s search impact
Site authority can be determined by a multitude of measuring tools. Historically, Google established its PageRank tool. PageRank represents the authority your site has obtained via other authoritative sites linking…
Additional ranking influences
User Data We left User data until last as this is the thing that can define search more than anything. Unless you regularly clear your cookies, Google knows you and…
Intro
In order to “do” SEO. You must first understand how search actually works. What is a search engine? You put in a query and Google instantly displays results and also…
Crawling
How does a search engine find the web pages in the first place? Firstly you can submit your website to search engines such as Google via webmaster tools access. http://www.google.com/webmasters/…
Indexing & Caching
In order to look up the information of the aforementioned files/web pages the search engine in question will need to keep a local copy of that file. This saved version…
Serving Results
In order to truly show how Google works the following interactive webpage gives us a great indication of what happens https://www.google.com/intl/en-GB/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/index.html A simplistic version taken from http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html is…