SEO Gloucester Guide to optimise your website

How Do Search Engines Work?

There are five key areas in how search engines work:

Crawl

Crawl refers to the process of the search engine robots discovering your website. The search engine robot will determine which pages of your website should be stored, or indexed, in the search engine’s organic results.

Cache

After the search engine robots decide which of your site’s pages should be indexed, the search engine makes copy of the web page and stores it on the search engine’s servers. This copy is called the cache.

Retrieve

Retrieve is the process that the search engine uses to find the pages that are relevant to a particular keyword search when a user enters a query.

Rank

Rank is how the search engines determine which order the pages should appear in the search engines. The rank is determined by a complex algorithm, which decides which page should appear as the 1st, 2nd or 1000th result.

Although the code of the search algorithm is not made public in order to protect the integrity of the ranking process, it is estimated that Google’s algorithm uses 200 ranking factors in order determine the rank for a web page.

SERP

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. A SERP is simply the page that is used to display the search engine ranking results to a user that has entered a keyword query.

The listings that appear on a SERP are typically of two types: organic and paid search listings. Each organic listing will include a title that contains a hyperlink to the actual page on the Web, the full URL of the web page and a short description which is an excerpt of the content on the page.

The Search Engine Web Crawler: How Google Discovers your Site

The search engines use software known as “web crawlers” to discover web pages that are publicly available. The most well-known crawler, which Google uses, is called “Googlebot.” Web crawlers review websites and follow the links found on these pages in a manner that is similar to how humans browse content on the Web. The web crawlers visit these links and return data about these web pages to the search engine’s servers.

But that’s just part of the story…

Web crawlers also rely on sitemaps that are provided by the website’s owners. The crawl process also utilises a list of web addresses from past crawls and simply look for links to other pages to visit as it reviews the websites on this list.

Off Page Optimisation: Link Building Introduction

The purpose of off page optimisation is to increase the authority of your site using links so that Google recognises your website as a more helpful option to users than your competitors’ websites. While the premise of off page optimisation sounds simple, achieving the best results from your off page optimisation efforts takes a lot of work and external link building will compromise much of the time that you spend on your SEO Gloucester strategy.

The Types of Links that Really Matter and How to Get Them

Not all links are created equally. If you want to build links that will actually help to improve the ranking of your website, here are the types of links that you should focus on building:

• Editorial links. These links are given out by high authority websites and you can get them simply by creating great content.
• Non-editorial links. These links come from websites that are relevant to your industry. You can get them by promoting your content to influencers.
• Local business directory links. Only those directories with high editorial discretion (i.e. 192.com, Nokia HERE, AccessPlace) will benefit your website. You can create these links by simply signing up for the service and adding your business information.

Black Hat SEO: Are Paid Links Worth The Risk?

Black hat SEO generally describes any technique that directly violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines. With each subsequent search engine algorithm update, black hat SEO has become increasingly less effective and doesn’t work in the long term.

This is because the search engines target these techniques in order to stop them from happening. Paying for links is one of these techniques that Google is strongly against. If you considering using black hat SEO and paid links to rank your website, don’t even bother.

Not only do you risk receiving penalties from Google, your site could be dropped from the search engines. Only ethical SEO tactics, commonly known as white hat SEO, will earn you high rankings in Google.