SEO 101 – Google for beginners

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Photo: Google

To master the technical aspects of SEO you need to know the SEO basics. In this blog post you will get the 2012 version of SEO 101 for Google.

Disclaimer: This is a blog posts for beginners, if you are a professional, please feel free to skip to the share buttons ;)  

The essential Google SEO concepts:

  • Crawling – Can Google find you website?
  • Indexing – Can Google process your content?
  • Serving search results – Is your content useful and relevant for x keyword?

Crawling

Crawling is when Google sends out its GoogleBots (robots, spiders, web crawlers etc) to find new pages and update old ones by following links. How often a page is crawled is determined by Google algorithms like PageRank. Links, user data (browser/toolbar data etc) and social engagement decide how fast and often a page gets crawled. If you have trouble getting new content crawled, you need to get some links and tweets to your domain. Other things that can help is pinging Google with XML sitemaps and adding URLs to social media sites. Or you could try asking to get it index with this form.

GoogleBot is getting smarter and is starting to crawl and index Flash, JavaScript and Ajax, but you better stay away from those for navigation and main content.

Indexing

After a page is crawled it will be processed before it gets added Google’s huge index. The index contains URLs, meta data, links and text. Not all content like text in images, Flash and Ajax can be indexed. To make sure your content can be indexed properly use text and pictures with descriptive meta tags. To see what is indexed type site:domain.com in the Google search box.

Video on YouTube is not automatically indexed without transcripts, but I think Google soon will start to convert voice to text and index them as well, making all video searchable.

Not only HTML documents gets index, Google indexes Docs, PDFs and Spreadsheets. They are treated as regular pages, and can outrank your HTML pages. So be aware of your non-HTML documents on your site.

Ranking the search results

google rankings shown in google webmaster tools

For every search Google wants to return the most relevant answers. Understanding how Google is ranking web pages is where things gets interesting. They have said they use more than 200 factors to rank results. Since 1998 PageRank and links has been the most important one. This is changing.

Google Search Plus Your World you will get results served based on your social connections and your profile. This is not completely new, they have served results based on personalization before. How many Google products do you use (Search, Chrome, Chromebook, Android, Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Google+, Google Reader)? Well, that’s how many data sources Google have on you, to serve relevant results for you.

Google want’s users to find relevant and great results. They use “long vs short clicks” as a quality signal. If a user click a result and stay away for a long time it means they found a great result, if they quickly bounce back it means they were unhappy with the result.

So make sure your site is found by Google, is indexed and gets lots of links and social engagement!

Inspiration for this blog post: Google basics.

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