SEO tip #1: What you need to know about SEO

bysmartketeer

6.8K followers

Updated 6 years ago

The very first thing you need to understand: the whole submitted web content – meaning over 1 billion websites! – is continuously crawled by search engines. Small software pieces – so-called spiders – follow links from one page to another and index literally everything they find on their way. In 2013 the Google Index has reached 100 million gigabytes with more than 30 trillion indexed pages! What does it mean? It means, that those spiders won’t – they simply cannot – visit your website on daily basis. Sometimes it can take o month or even two months to get your site re-indexed.

The second very important aspect: unlike humans, search engines are text-driven. They are performing complex, interrelated activities – such as crawling, indexing, processing, retrieving, etc – in order to “read” and to “understand” your website. Crawlers do not see images, videos, Flash elements, frames, Javascript segments, etc. All these goodies are completely invisible for spiders, therefore they will not be indexed and processed. They will be non-existent for search engines! I know, it sounds a bit scary, but don’t worry, it’s extremely easy to avoid these problems. All you have to do, is to use a free spider simulator to “reveal” the items that are invisible for crawlers.

Once a web page has been crawled, its content will be indexed and stored in a giant database, from where it can be retrieved anytime. Normally, you’ll have to submit a request to a given search engine in order to get your site indexed, but sometimes – when a crawler is landing on your site after following an external link – it just happens automatically. How long does it take Google or Bing to index your site once you have submitted your request? Well, the time can – and will – vary. Usually a newly added site should be crawled and indexed within 4 days to 4 weeks. If you want to find out if your site is indexed in a given search engine yet, all you have to do, is to perform a simple search, typing “site:yourdomainname.com” in the search bar. At this very moment this method works well using the main search box both on Google and Bing.

That’s really cool, but what if you can’t find your site in the search engines? Well, most likely your website is unfindable, uncrawlable or un-indexable. In this case you will have to verify the general settings, the robots.txt, the sitemap and the navigational structure of your website to find the problem that prevents the spiders from crawling and indexing your website.

Once your site has been indexed you can start thinking about how to improve your initial rankings. When a search engine receives a search request the search string is compared with all the indexed pages existing in the database, and various – extremely complex, continuously changing – algorithms will calculate the relevancy and the popularity of each and every webpage that contains the search term in its index. Each search engine has its own rules and algorithms. That’s why different search engines give different results for the very same search query or search string.

These almighty algorithms will analyze hundreds and hundreds of factors and variables to decide the ranking you deserve. There are variables that you can’t control – for example, trending topics -, and there are variables that you can optimize to get better rankings. This optimization effort is called search engine optimization or SEO. Done well, will provide outstanding results and an impressive ROI. Done imperfectly or poorly, will harm the visibility of your online business. If you choose to ignore it … you’ll become invisible.