Just How Does Seo Work?

SEO, which is short for Search Engine Optimisation, works by making your site "friendlier" for search engines such as Google to list in their index.

No-one knows for sure just how many pages Google has indexed. It gave up posting that figure some time ago as it's irrelevant to the average internet surfer - we only want relevant results when we're searching and don't really care about the literally millions of pages that were discarded on the way.

As website owners we only really care about our pages being found for searches that are relevant to our website. And that's what SEO is all about.

Google and the other engines don't disclose precisely how they decide which sites rank at the top of the results for any given search phrase. That would be like Coke revealing their recipe or KFC listing their herbs and spices. Instead, we have to use other tools to find out how SEO works.

In a nutshell, a search engine has to make a snap decision about what a page is all about. So, if a page mentions a monkey, the search engine has to interpret whether the page is about a monkey as a primate, a monkey as a British slang term for 500 or maybe a monkey wrench as a tool. SEO works by helping the search engines with that decision.