Understanding Search Engines Helps You Understand SEO
Successful SEO means first identifying what search engines want and then optimising both the on page and off page elements of each individual web page in order to meet these demands. While very few precise details of search engine algorithms are known for definite, since the search engines treat them as a closely guarded secret, benchmarking and testing as well as thorough research has led to the understanding of what the search engines require.
Before we can even begin to calculate the search engine's requirements, an SEO service needs to understand the role of the search engine and how they effectively fulfil this role when creating their search engine result pages.
The aim of most search engines is to generate a list of high quality and relevant web pages that are relevant to a user's search. As such, SEO is the science of creating a web page that meets these exacting standards in order to rank highly in the search engines results.
Spiders, or software applications, are used by the search engines in order to crawl the web travelling from one page to another via the links on those pages. As they do this they record pieces of information from both the linking page and the resulting page as well as the link itself.
Algorithms are then used in order to calculate the value of each individual page and assign them a ranking in the search results for a particular keyword; keywords which are determined by on page content and the anchor text of inbound links.
The result of this is the search engine result page that is displayed to users when they conduct a search for a specific keyword and the aim of a good SEO campaign is to rank as highly as possible in the search engine result pages for keywords most relevant to that page.
