I won’t bore you with a lot of mundane and highly technical details of how search engines locate, store and filter data, but I think it ’ s important to have a basic understanding of how search engines work.
So what is an algorithm anyway? Simply put, it’s a series of process es and set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations. For the purpose of computing, algorithms are written in pseudocode, flow charts, or programming sequences in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function.
A recipe is an example of a simple algorithm. It’s a well-defined sequence of steps to be completed in an unambiguous manner for a specific outcome.
Blah,blah,blah. How do you get to the top of the search engines? Let’s first do one more brush with understanding the general nature of search engines.
Google ’s process to return relevant information to searchers is 3 basic steps. Bots “crawl” the internet constantly looking for new information, they capture and index that information into their databases and then assign it a quality score based on that algorithm which will determine if it shows up above or below other similar pages.
But how does it determine which web pages are the best and most relevant? While Google is notoriously unforthcoming about their “secret sauce” there are identifiable patterns that we can “optimize” for.
The Google algorithm uses over 200 different factors of various weights when evaluating pages. Your website, all of it’s sub-pages and even outside references to your site are analyzed and issued a fluid “quality score” based on your website’s ability to answer that specific query.
The primary factors are:
We ’ ll go into more detail about each of these factors as we progress through these 10 chapters.
This guide is intended to instruct you on specific yet basic actions you can take to quickly optimize your site without getting bogged down in technical details.