SEOmoz-The-Beginners-Guide-To-SEO-2012(1).pdf

1. Crawling and Indexing

Crawling and indexing the billions of

documents, pages, files, news,

videos and media on the world wide

web.

2. Providing Answers

Search engines have two major functions - crawling & building an

index, and providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving

results.

Providing answers to user queries,

most frequently through lists of

relevant pages, through retrieval and

rankings.

Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway

system.

Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other

file). The search engines need a way to “crawl” the entire city and find all the stops along the way,

so they use the best path available – links.

“The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together.”

Through links, search engines’ automated robots, called “crawlers,” or “spiders” can reach the

many billions of interconnected documents.

Once the engines find these pages, they next decipher the code from them and store selected pieces

in massive hard drives, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the

monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the

search engines have constructed datacenters all over the world.

These monstrous storage facilities hold thousands of machines processing large quantities of

information. After all, when a person performs a search at any of the major engines, they demand

results instantaneously – even a 1 or 2 second delay can cause dissatisfaction, so the engines work

hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

Search engines are answer machines . When a person looks for something online, it requires the

search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things – first, return only

those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher’s query, and second, rank those results in

order of perceived usefulness. It is both “ relevance ” and “ importance ” that the process of SEO

is meant to influence.

To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page with the right words. In the

early days of the web, search engines didn’t go much further than this simplistic step, and their

results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through evolution, smart engineers at the engines devised

better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, 100s of

factors influence relevance, many of which we’ll discuss throughout this guide.

How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?

Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularit y – the more popular a

site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This

assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase

users’ satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.

Popularity and relevance aren’t determined manually. Instead, the engines craft careful,

mathematical equations – algorithms – to sort the wheat from the chaff and to then rank the

wheat in order of tastiness (or however it is that farmers determine wheat’s value).

These algorithms are often comprised of hundreds of components. In the search marketing field,

we often refer to them as “ranking factors” SEOmoz crafted a resource specifically on this subject –

Search Engine Ranking Factors .

You can surmise that search engines

believe that Ohio State is the most

relevant and popular page for the

query “Universities” while the result,

Harvard, is less relevant/popular.

or "How Search Marketers Succeed"

The complicated algorithms of search engines may appear at first glance to be impenetrable. The

engines themselves provide little insight into how to achieve better results or garner more traffic.

What information on optimization and best practices that the engines themselves do provide is

listed below:

Googlers recommend the following to get better rankings in their

search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't

deceive your users or present different content to search engines

than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as

cloaking.

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page

should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that

clearly and accurately describe your content. Make sure that

your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and

accurate.

Use keywords to create descriptive, human friendly URLs.

Provide one version of a URL to reach a document, using 301

redirects or the rel="canonical" element to address duplicate

content.

Bing engineers at Microsoft recommend the following to get better

rankings in their search engine:

Ensure a clean, keyword rich URL structure is in place

Make sure content is not buried inside rich media (Adobe Flash

Player, JavaScript, Ajax) and verify that rich media doesn't hide

links from crawlers.

Create keyword-rich content based on research to match what

users are searching for. Produce fresh content regularly.

Don’t put the text that you want indexed inside images. For

example, if you want your company name or address to be

indexed, make sure it is not displayed inside a company logo.

Over the 15 plus years that web search has existed, search

marketers have found methods to extract information about how

the search engines rank pages. SEOs and marketers use that data

to help their sites and their clients achieve better positioning.

Surprisingly, the engines support many of these efforts, though the public visibility is frequently

low. Conferences on search marketing, such as the Search Marketing Expo , Pubcon , Search

Engine Strategies , Distilled & SEOmoz’s own MozCon attract engineers and representatives

from all of the major engines. Search representatives also assist webmasters by occasionally

participating online in blogs, forums & groups.

There is perhaps no greater tool available to webmasters researching the activities of the engines than the freedom to use the search engines

to perform experiments, test theories and form opinions. It is through this iterative, sometimes painstaking process, that a considerable

amount of knowledge about the functions of the engines has been gleaned.

1. Register a new website with nonsense keywords (e.g.

ishkabibbell.com)

5. Record the search engines’ activities and the rankings of the

pages

2. Create multiple pages on that website, all targeting a similarly

ludicrous term (e.g. yoogewgally)

6. Make small alterations to the identically targeting pages to

determine what factors might push a result up or down against

its peers

3. Test the use of different placement of text, formatting, use of

keywords, link structures, etc by making the pages as uniform as

possible with only a singular difference

7. Record any results that appear to be effective and re-test on

other domains or with other terms – if several tests consistently

return the same results, chances are you’ve discovered a pattern

that is used by the search engines.

4. Point links at the domain from indexed, well-spidered pages on

other domains

In this test, we started with the hypothesis that a link higher up in a page’s code carries more

weight than a page lower down in the code. We tested this by creating a nonsense domain linking

out to three pages, all carrying the same nonsense word exactly once. After the engines spidered

the pages, we found that the page linked to from the highest link on the home page ranked first.

This process is not alone in helping to educate search marketers.

Competitive intelligence about signals the engines might use and how they might order results is

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