What is SEO?
Search engine optimization is the act of acquiring traffic from search engines for the digital assets that we own.
SEO is really just 3 things.
- Document Relevancy: It’s important for search engines to understand pages that users are looking for.
- Authority & Attention: It is the metrics that tell search engines that they are useful to users for example (links, views, downloads).
- Technical Optimization: the engineering makes finding our pages easier.
Document Relevancy
As early as before google, search enginer used to be very bad at finding relevant pages, also to be known as finding relevant documents.
So what is Document Relevancy?
In two sentences:
It’s the search engine’s job to understand what the user wants and help them find it.
It’s our job as marketers to create awesome, relevant content that answers their question.
Increasing Authority ( Authority & Attention)
Imagine you had to pick the 10 best pages out of millions of results.
How would you do it?
What metrics would you look at?
Broadly, it comes down to popularity.
- Links from authoritative sites
- Clicks & engagement
- Video views
- Sales
- Favorites
- Likes
Technical Optimization
Technical optimization is the process of making it easier for search engines to find us.
Different Types of Search Engine
- YouTube
- Amazon
- Mobile Search
- Google Places
- App Store
- Yelp
- Quora
- eBay
- Local Search
- Anything with search!
How to be relevant to search engines?
Every platform with a search engine has to solve the document relevancy problem.
To do this, they generally ask themselves two questions.
- What’s best for our users?
- What’s best for our business?
If your content is the answer to one or both of these questions, it is a relevant document and you would be able to rank on the search engine.
Algorithm Updates can throw you off the search index. So learn about them here:
- Hummingbird
- Panda
- Penguin
- EMD
- Caffeine
- BERT
- Medic
- E-A-T / YMYL
- Site Diversity
- Many Core Updates
Resources: ⮕ Google Algorithm Update History
If you’re not in the top 5 results,
you are effectively invisible.
