How Does SEO Work

I did the research, so you don't have to!

I know it sound ridiculous, but I had no idea what the acronym S.E.O. meant. Search Engine Optimization, and it is the first thing you should learn when considering how to make money online. Search engines, I have learned, have four functions in all - crawling, building an index, figuring relevancy plus ranking, and last but not least, serving results. Now, by telling you the four functions it doesn't mean I expect you to understand them, I know I didn't. I had to look around and read several bits of information from around the web and also in some really great articles here on HubPages (I'll provide you a list of other hubs to hop over and read below).

Providing you're still with me, here we go. One by one I am going to give you the breakdown of what I have learned about the four functions of "SEO."

Understanding SEO and its Four Functions

#1 CRAWLING:

• It boils down to what we can imagine happening in cyberspace. Think of the web as a network of locations along a busy city transit-route. (This location is most likely a web page, but could also be a JPG, PDF, or any other file). The search engine requires a way to find or "crawl" to every location along this transit-route. Being efficient, they want to use the best and most direct path to these locations, we call them links. These links are what we are trying to create, a direct and efficient path to our web page or file. The search engine is going to find the highest ranking link (path) to a location (your page), thus making the trip (search) the best experience to the best location desired. If you can create the best links to your page, you have accomplished SEO.
• The link configuration of the world wide web is the thing that binds together all of the pages ever created and that are available to access. The links we create are used by the search engines automated robots, called "spiders" or for our purpose here, "crawlers" to access all of the billions and billions of connected pages.

#2 INDEXING:

• Now that the search engines have located all of the pages, the pages have to be indexed; they extract information and store it within huge hard drives (storage units) found everywhere on earth (practically) to be easily recalled when some person makes a request/query online. The search engines have a tough job, they provide access for the billions of world wide web users to every page stored. In our society we are very enveloped in the concept of "now means right now". So when you make a request of any of the major engines, you demand results within seconds. Having to wait even 4 or 5 seconds could send you looking elsewhere for your information. Thus, the engines work very hard to provide you with the fastest and most accurate information.

#3 RELEVANCE & RANKING:

• It is "relevance" and "importance" that search engines set out to influence. Every time a person is searching for something online the engine has to look through all of the billions of pages stored away and provide both of these functions—call up only the information that the searcher will find relevant and helpful to the query, and also provide a "ranking" for that information in the order of importance that the stored data is assumed to have.
• Relevance means more than putting words on your page that get searched for by the public. The search engines have developed an evolutionary approach to results, and have very smart engineers that came up with better ways to assess such data. I learned that in early web search design, engines didn't think they needed smarter ways to extract the requested information.The fact that their simplistic methods showed negative results, caused the search engines to rewrite the methods of data search and word identification on the web. This means that today, many things influence the way a search engine will extract data and rank it, it also means that when you conduct a search, the results will be far better and more on target than in the early web search days.

#4 SERVING RESULTS:

• Search engines do a really good job at a very difficult task, which is quantifying the importance of the information they extract from the storage units during a query. As it stands, the major engines tend to interpret popular as important . Which, has actually worked out in providing some of the best results available. It is bothersome to assume because something (a page, document, file, or site) has popularity it also has higher quality information. I guess there is something to be said for experience after all; besides I also learned that the search engines continued use of metrics that interpret popularity, increased user satisfaction significantly. So it would seem, popular is in fact important.