Moz Seo Guide
What SEO is how can help your business, why it's important to you and some of the best practices this little introduction should take 10 to 15 minutes hopefully, they'll give you a lot of the basics let's dive right in so when you perform a search on the major search engines right I'm using Google as an example here you get something like this right you get these results and the team to tend to be very relevant to the search that you performed they give you lots of good information. Google tends to order things and do you order that they think is most appropriate most relevant most popular those kinds of things and these results over the years have gotten really really good let's figure out.
How did they do this, what's the process? search engines use to calculate relevancy to figure out which results to put in here and to see which ones rank highest. so the first thing that search engines do in order to find pages on the internet which is a huge massive place with literally hundreds of billions of different URLs different pages of content across hundreds of millions of websites is search engines. Right spiders they're automated programs also called BOTS. In this case Google uses one that identifies itself because it crawls the web as Googlebot and I've drawn this hopefully adorable picture to help illustrate that these search engines crawl the web so they look at they'll start with a seed set of websites and then they'll crawl out from there looking at all the pages that those websites link to.
They use those links to find the structure of the Internet and to discover all the pages on the web. It turns out that the web is highly interconnected and that you can reach even the far corners of the Internet in just a few hops away from. Some of the most popular and important websites after they Crawley the web they build an index of these documents, they do what's called a keyword inverted index which means that they store all the documents by the terms and phrases that appear on them. where they think are relevant to them so that it's very quick when you search for example NASA Google knows hey we've already got an index of all the pages that we found and we think are relevant to NASA and we can make queries against those much more quickly than we could against say an index with all of the hundreds of billions of documents on the web once they've got those indices they calculate what they call query independent metrics.
I know that sounds fancy and tough to get your head around it's really actually quite simplistic. you see the search engines know that pages have attributes that are important in relation to the keywords that someone search for but they also have attributes of importance of popular things like how many people link to them, who links to them, what are those people saying about them, are the people who linked to them reputable and trustworthy are the people who linked to the popular and important which gets to the PageRank algorithm which we won't go into depth here on but you can read more about in some of our other resources.
They calculate these metrics so, that it's very fast when they say show me all the pages from NASA, and order them by the most popular and important ones that they can quickly know which ones which pages in that keyword inverted index are the most popular most relevant. most important ones, as opposed to just which ones, are in there and now we have to calculate all that data on the fly so search engines do these millions and millions of calculations in fractions of the time it used to take them back in the day to crawl the web build an index do this pre-processing calculation stuff and issue these things out Google would take nearly a month. In fact they had monthly updates that they used to call the Google dance today that same dance takes less than a few hours pretty remarkable so let's go back to the search results and talk for a sec about how people actually use these search results the thing is when when folks are typing words and phrases in here the results that come up are related to their queries certainly but they also take into account a lot of things about search or behavior and how people use things there are all sorts of stuff in the results now like personalization and vertical search and these kinds of things what I want to talk about today real quick is the demand.
How people think about what things to type into these boxes and why that's so important to marketers to businesses and anyone who's thinking about practicing SEO so let's take a quick drive over here and talk about keyword demand so the really interesting thing is that while lots and lots of people will do common searches like I mentioned NASA they'll search for you know things like car loans they might search for their favorite ice cream store down the street and then they might search for very very strange things like a combination of their name in addition to some press release right and probably very few people perform those searches the really weird thing about this is those searches that are performed many many thousands of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of times a month actually represent only a small fraction of the total quantity of searches that are performed in Google.
In fact if you take all of the searches that are performed more than 100 times a month you're going to find that adds up to less than 30 percent of all the searches that take place that means that 70% or more on searches take place in what SEO is called the long table now the long tail of demand is those strange weird keywords that only get searched for maybe a few times a month maybe only once a month ever but it turns out that the those odd searches those many multi-word searches take up the massive amount of demand in the search engines overall in fact Google came out with a stat a few years ago they said that a full 20% 1/5 of all the queries that are performed on Google search engine have never been performed before each month 1/5 have never been seen before no one's ever searched for them it's an absolutely remarkable stat and it speaks to the size of a long tail.
There are lots of people searching for used cars or car loans or NASA or a telephone directory look up these kinds of popular searches, but there are tons more people and more searches taking place in those strange weird results where it's hard to even know what people are searching for let's take a look back at the search results so someone's performed a search in here right we've done a search let's say let's say for NASA I'm looking for the National Aeronautics and Space Agency I hope that's the acronym and you can see here that they've got these results these results right here are called organic and they are generated through this algorithmic process that we've been talking about today the crawling the indexing the calculation of results and then the algorithm that ranks them all up here this portion over here is called paid search or pay-per-click.
The paid search results are done in completely different way advertisers will bid on placement in these results you can do it through programs like Google's Adwords or bings ad. Center and these results on average garner about 10 to 15% of all the clicks on an average search result page these results over here the organic ones they tend to get between 85 to 90 percent of all those clicks. There's a ton of traffic going to these search results these organic results and the only way to influence them is with SEO let's talk about how to do that it turns out that ,SEO is a very simple process but one that's challenging to execute well today I'm going to walk through some of these basics of how you do SEO and get your pages into the search engines indices and give them the ability to rank as well as they possibly can so first we're going to start at the base of the SEO best practices pyramid with content and accessibility it turns out that pretty obviously if you don't have content on your website content search engines can read which 99% of time means text content or hopefully images with attributes about them or video or audio content that have some text associated as well.
If you don't have that content and have pages that the search engines can actually reach with their spiders you're going to be in trouble right so here's, Googlebot he's coming along and he can reach all these pages but if there are outlying pages down here that maybe no one's linked to or they've been blocked with something like robots.txt or they've told the search engines to no index those pages or the content on those pages doesn't appear by default it only shows two logged in users. it only shows when you have JavaScript enabled it only shows when you've inputted some form fields search engines can't do that right the spiders don't have the ability to get through those sort of walls to accessibility and so it's really important to make that great content accessible to the search engines that's your first step from where we're going to move on to some keyword research and targeting now this one gets a little bit trickier because not only do you have to produce the content and make it accessible but you also have to have that content targeting things that people are actually searching for on the web right.
If you've got a great page all about running shoes, but you describe them as fast-moving Footwear turns out that the search engines and humans as well are going to be very unlikely to determine that your page is relevant and to want to click it even if they do see it in the search results, for this reason, it's important to use tools Google maintains several with their AdWords program. Bahm also has some there are some third-party tools that you can use to do this types of keyword research and they'll show you when you input keywords some expansions of those phrases and tell you how many times people are looking for them so I can see that running shoes were searched for four hundred and twenty-five thousand times that's the search engines estimate anyway four hundred and twenty five thousand times last month in the United States and those estimates can help give me a sense of hmm I can see that football shoes are particularly popular one thing you do want to be aware of is that these numbers do change so you're going to want to regularly make sure you're updating your information as Trane's change and people do searches differently.
News types of products and services become of interest to searchers and old ones fade out for example football shoes is probably really popular because this month while we're filming this it's August and in August a lot of people are thinking about football season for their you know kids in college or high school athletes all those kinds of things next month two months from now four months from now the popularity might go down and so you want to keep track of that once you've got the content that you need you've made it accessible to search engines and you've done your keyword research and put those words on the pages in the right kinds of ways you're ready to move on to link popularity it turns out that when search results get competitive when there's a lot of people trying to all rank for the same searches which really happens when these popular important searches that have high commercial value come into play things like running shoes you're going to see that links are the main item that helps you push over the edge and get to the top of the results if you have more people linking to you better people linking to people linking to with the right kinds of words for example if I'm trying to rank for running shoes it would really be helpful if this link right in here said running shoes right and then pointed that link make it underlined right to my web page that tells the search engines not only is this page voting for this page as a good resource but it's saying this page is a really good resource about running shoes.
This is much better than if they use something like click here right if you don't like that that's not good so this link popularity that search engines have lots and lots of different metrics that they calculate about links and in fact they do a ton of work to make sure that they're not counting links from bad places spammy places manipulative places so if you get lots of offers saying oh you can boost your rankings you know in 10 minutes just by paying us 50 dollars and getting listed in 5,000 you know directories or these kinds of things those offers tend to be pretty shady if they sound too good to be true most likely they are what you want to do for link hilarity is produce good content that people want to link to find good ways to market that content and get the word out there about not only your brand but the things on your website so that people will naturally want to vote and link for those to those pages the last piece in the puzzle and by extension actually the smallest piece of the puzzle currently for search engines is social media signals so it turns out that the search engines Google and being both have made deals with services like Twitter Gmail obviously is controlled by Google and Bing has all the relationships that the Microsoft suite of products things like MSN and hotmail and those kinds of things and Microsoft also has an investment in Facebook which may give them some access to data there as these social sharing services provide information about the web's link graph about what's popular and important what people are sharing what they're liking what they're you know giving a thumbs up to on something like a stumble upon or sharing with their friends on Facebook or tweeting about those signals make your way into the search engines as well we're still in the early stages of how search engines treat that data but it's a good bet and in the future.
It'll become more important and that's why it's critical to make sure that as you're doing great SEO you're also thinking about hey how can I make my content my website relevant and valuable to people on these social platforms all right I think now that you've got this pyramid down you are ready to dive deeper I will say we have barely scratched the surface here in terms of the best practices what needs to be done but we've given a good idea and a good overview from here I encourage you to check out our beginners guide to SEO the beginner's guide is located on the learn SEO page you can search for SEO guide and find it in Google there's a ton of deep information in there lots of good resources and links urge you to check it out and hopefully we'll see you in the exciting world of SEO take care you.
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