How to explain to family and friends what you do for a living!

March 26 2013

Everything starts with the Search!

The web search engine is a system or software code that is designed to search for information on (indexing) the World Wide Web. The results for a search are usually offered in a line of results referred as Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s). The story of the first SE – Archie began 23 years ago back in 1990 and because of the amount of data on the sites at that point on the web it was easy searchable manually and there was no need for indexing the content.

Nowadays the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web is Google with hundreds of millions of queries per day.As the evolution of search has grown to a level that every answer is served to the user exactly by the searched query, then we can freely state that Google has the biggest mission of them all – bringing together the worlds of information and making them universally accessible as well as useful to every single user out-there. In simple words the Google Search Engine has the duty to crawl and index the web in just seconds so it can display and serve the most relevant search result found, whenever and wherever a search query is submitted. Fact: Thousands of processors and computers in Google are involved in processing a single search query.

Displaying the most relevant search result is made by the SE secret software weapon called crawler or spider or Googlebot as is the case with Google) – and the algorithm which helps the search engines to turn all of the useful information on the web into a valuable and relevant search. On the other the search engines crawl the Web not only to serve the crawled results to the user but also to look at particular site items in order to get an idea what precisely the site is about.

When you own a web site – search results matter!

One of the interesting facts about website ranking is that Google uses over 300 factors to rank websites which includes PageRank. The order on the SERP’s whenever a search query is submitted to Google is based particularly on a patented algorithm or priority rank called “Page Rank”. Larry Page & Sergey Brin were the developers who established for the first time this feature (as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine) for the Google Search which provides to the searchers information based on the available HTML, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF documents, Flash SWF, plain text files and others within the memory of the web servers. In regards to the page rank many of the webmasters nowadays use the Google toolbar – an internet browser toolbar that is available by Google which displays the PageRank of the user’s visited page as a number from 0 to 10. For example the http://www.usa.gov has page rank 10, a fact which shows how much is this site “popular”, and therefore the least popular sites have PageRank 0. Also, on the Google Search the users have the option to choose the “safe search“(a powerful search tool that filters search results to enhance your children safe search experience). I’m Feeling Lucky search is another option that whenever clicked will take the user to the first search result, by passing the SE results page. So if you don’t want to bother with many options to choose from, you can click this one. Smart ha!

Being on Google it means that you are on the Web!

The other day I was reading a post by a technological geek, with a headline: Google, “The Search Engine King”- it made me think about it. After a research I discovered that this is completely true. Since the year of its creation – 1999 the year when the Google company has entered the big door and until present time Google has become the leading Search Engine on the Web with several competitors like Chinese Baidu and Soso.com – the number one in South Korea according to Alexa.com, Yandex in Russia, Seznam in the Czech Republic, Yahoo in Japan and Bing worldwide.

Besides the main feature of searching for a text query, Google Search has more than 22 “special features” that can be activated by entering any trigger word while searching. (Weather, stock quotes, time, area code and others) One of the other search features of the google search is the “instant search” – suggested results while the searcher types the query, introduced by Google in 2010 and from day one the search engine marketers were speculating that this search will have a big impact on organic and paid search. The difference between these two is the following: the search results offered to the user in paid search are paid by the advertiser (online marketing expert) or the opposite are presented and offered naturally by the web crawlers and called organic search results.

One of the other search features of the google search is the “instant search” – suggested results while the searcher types the query, introduced by Google in 2010 and from day one the search engine marketers were speculating that this search will have a big impact on organic and paid search. The difference between these two is the following:  the search results offered to the user in paid search are paid by the advertiser (online marketing expert) or the opposite are presented and offered naturally by the web crawlers and called organic search results.

Since I believe that this explanation of how the search engines work is enough for the newbies next is the introduction to the SEO process and trying on the simplest way to explain what I do for a living.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation!

Search engine optimisation is the process of gaining traffic from free, unpaid, natural or organic listings on the search engines, with no difference if the SE is the one of Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu or other and the web sites with significant content such as text, videos or local listings are shown based on what the search engine considers most relevant for the users.

As the SE are getting more and more used by the searchers daily, the website owners are trying to find new ways to make their websites shown on higher position in the search results as this will affect their outcome and economic profit . An Interesting fact contributing to this is the statistic that 75% of the web users never view the second page of the search results, with over 1.4 billion searches of the common search terms – keywords are conducted every hour, this is a big number and highly significant detail to ignore.

The birth of the new process on the web called SEO was a result of all of this, the Search Engines, the growth of the web data, the new websites, the users and their intent to click on various staff therefore visiting the links that are on the top of the offered list by the SE as they are the most relevant results from their search. If you are wondering yourself why some of these results come first in the list then the answer is simple and it is all of the SEO techniques being implemented on those web sites, the design and popularity of the site itself. As we already mentioned the search engines perform activities in order to deliver search results to the users – crawling the web, indexing content, processing it , calculating relevancy by keyword density, links, or metatags, and retrieving the search results or summarizing the results in endless pages that are sorted from the most relevant to the least relevant sites and search results. It is probably the best moment to mention that all search engines, (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) change their algorithms regularly and if you want to stay on the top of the list, you must follow the latest trends and algorithmic changes (Panda, Penguin etc.) and in addition adapt the website to the latest updates. Nevertheless for various Search engines various techniques are needed; as all of the SE’s have different factors of influence for higher rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t a one-time event!

Being an SEO expert or just a simple online marketing beginner you will hear a lot about: Traffic & PageRank’s, domain age, keyword density, title, description and H1 or H2 tags as the most relevant headings of your sites, sitemaps, robots txt, fresh content, backlinking, interlinking, reciprocal, rankjuice, redirects, smart URL’s, www vs non-www, Google Analytics & Webmaster tools, social media sites and lots of other “white hat” techniques suitable by the Search Engines, as practices that are demanded for better performance of your site in their listings and your SEO skills.

When you are in this industry as the one that is offering its services or represent a company, you will often have clients saying: What is the best and fastest way to gain traffic? What can we do to increase the page ranking and position in the SE? How can I get position number one in Google? What’s…?

A professional online marketer will give the best answer but cannot promise number-one-position on the SE. If you are the client do not let anyone fool you. The SEO isn’t a one-time event; it is a bonding and difficult process, therefore no one can promise the best results in no-time, but can promise to do his/her best for a high quality web site and performance in the SERP’s. As conclusion to this I will only add this: investing time and resources in SEO can actually make sales.

Therefore if you are just a family or a friend of an SEO guru No Worries, you will get a lot of help when needed by a person who knows much about Google, on the other if you are a beginner in the field then you have a lot of learning to do from SEO webinars, SEO videos from specialists like this one, must do a lot of blogging, many hours spent on social media sites, learn how to use many SEO tools, onsite and offsite techniques and become the best SEO expert you can. Never forget to commit to the SEO process, as the Search Engine’s algorithms are updated regularly, the SEO tactics that worked best the previous month might not work this month.

It is one of the processes that require a long-term outlook and learning-new-skills attitude. In conclusion, using the words that users search for, putting them in the important and relevant places on the site and on other web places, getting links that will show to the SE the importance of the web site pages is probably the shortest explanation for the SEO.

For better understanding of the Search Engines, the SEO techniques, facts and details about How to do SEO read more on this awesome & extraordinary blog post by Jon Cooper.

If you liked this one then I’m looking forward to your thoughts in the comments, and I’d love it if you passed this along.

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