How Does SEO Work? What SEO Does Your Site Need?

Like a lot of things to do with computers, there's a certain amount of mystery attached to how does SEO work? This isn't helped with different people telling you different things that often contradict each other. They can't all be right, can they?

One of the biggest stumbling blocks with working out how SEO works is that - apart from an inner circle at companies like Google - no-one knows the precise mix of how search results are arrived at. But that actually doesn't matter too much. We know the main variables involved, just not the precise ratios they work in. A bit like cloning a famous recipe, we can get close enough.

SEO works because a computer needs a way to score a page to determine where it shows up in the results.

It needs to do that regardless of the words you type in and regardless of the language that you use.

When a search engine robot crawls your pages, it takes a snapshot of them and stores this so that it can analyse them in its own time.

Google and the other search engines have trillions of web pages indexed (a trillion is a million million). Because of the computing power involved, they have to process these pages in the background before they can add them to the search results. Which is why your site will often bounce around the search results before it settles somewhere.

In order to help the search engines make sense of your website pages, you need to give them as many clues as possible as to what your page is about.

In a nutshell, these clues are what makes SEO work.

Search engine algorithms know that certain elements of your pages are more important than others. So, much like a newspaper or magazine, the headline is important.

And actually with a web page there are really two headlines:

The title of the page is the headline that you see with a blue underline in the search results. This needs to be relevant to the content of your web page - don't make the common mistake of using your company name as part of the page title, most searchers couldn't care less about that (they'd have searched for you by name if they did). Use all available characters wisely - you've got around 60 - 65 characters to play with - but remember that the page title has to make sense to a computer as well as real life humans.

Next in importance in making SEO work for you is the meta description. This is often ignored, especially by website creation programs like WordPress. But you ignore it at your peril - it's the block of text that appears below your page title in the search results.

Think how often you use that short description to decide which search result to click on.

Then figure that your potential website visitors will carry out the same process.

Then work on your meta description so that it appeals to searchers!

This brief overview should help you to begin to understand how SEO works. Search engine optimisation is not rocket science but it certainly needs to be paid attention to consistently and there are lots more factors to consider than the couple we've examined above.