From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

How search engines work

From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO

How search engines work

- SEO is beyond just Google and Bing but it really is the search engines and the web page listings that most people think about when they talk about SEO when they want to do well with SEO. And it's important to understand maybe some of the basics of how the search engines work in those cases. A search engine goes out and finds pages from all across the web, that's the crawler mechanism of it. This stores all those pages in what we call the index which you can think of as a big book of the web. So Google has a book of the web that is billions and billions of pages wide. And then when someone does a search, they type in their words and Google, Bing, they sort through all the pages that are out there and they pick out the ones that they think are very best. And the system that they use to pick out the best is called an algorithm. You can think of it as a recipe. And they all have their own recipe, there are lots of different factors that work into it. Google will tell you there's like 200 different factors that are involved. How people link to the page. What are the words that people use when they link to the page? What are the words on the page? Do we think this page has a good reputation or not? Is this page friendly to the mobile user or not? Does it load up quickly? These are all various kinds of factors and SEO is about trying to align your content with the factors that the search engines want. And these factors are broadly divided into two categories. There's content categories, things you can do on the page that are in your control and how you're writing and producing it. There are architecture factors, which are things that you can do technically to control how the page may render or show up in the search engine. And then beyond that we have other factors that are off the page if you will, things that are not directly in your control but have an influence. Such as how things are socially shared or the way people are linking it to you. All those sorts of things together, we've even put together what we call our own periodic table of SEO that divides them all up. But really if you focus on your content and your technical and some of your sharing you're got to be hitting all the main stuff that you need to be doing.

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