How Search Works

This is just a quick one as a semi follow-up to my "What SEO is really" post, and also because I think a lot of people don't exactly visualize keywords and search engines correctly (It took me a while to really "get it").

I also think things like Twitter, FB et al with their #hashtags are training people to think that putting a keyword on a site is similar to putting a hashtag on a tweet or whatever.

In fact, I think sometime long ago, maybe manually entering a list of tags and keywords into your site contributed to SEO, but...

Not any more.

People often wonder: "How will Google know what my site/page/post is about?"

Well...it doesn't really work like that.

What Google does is index everything on your page, and store it. It of course records data like Headings and so on.

What it does NOT do is say "Ok...let's file this under XYZ topic". Nope.

Here's how it works.

When somebody types something into Google and hits search, Google runs through its entire index of the Internet and finds pages where those words appear.

It then analyses all of those pages (in about half a second), asking around TWO HUNDRED different questions to determine which pages you might like to see displayed on page one. Questions such as:

What is the title of the page?

How close together are the words searched?

What is the URL of the page?

What is the QUALITY of the site?

Is it an authority? (Does it have lots of similar content across the site?).

There are 200 of these..so I'm not going to list them all. It probably has more complicated ways of determining if you are an authority etc too..but that's not the point.

This is also how one page can rank for many different keywords...basically any words on your page will get that page "considered" by the algorithm when someone types in those words.

The reason you focus on one Keyword per post is because the more focused your post is, the more likely it is to find its way to page one of the search results.

Additionally, the strength of the site as a whole is considered, which is why you sometimes find people who create one post for a very good keyword, but it doesn't get to page one immediately. They need time to prove their site's worthiness.

The more good content you write, the more each individual page is worth. It's an aggregate scoring.

Some questions Google asks are worth more than others.

Watch this video that Google released explaining it some more.

Before you watch it though...

This video was made in 2010. The "questions" Google asks have changed since then. Don't take his examples literally and say "Oh so I need backlinks" etc. The video is here to illustrate HOW it works, not HOW to get to page one.

GOOGLE'S VIDEO

Hope that clears things up for a lot of people.