Making Sense of SEO: Lecture 2
What SEO tactics really work
There’s a lot of bad SEO advice out there. Partly because it’s all outdated. There was a time where you could play lots of little keyword tricks to convince search engines to send you more visitors for keywords you care about. But those times are mostly over now.
Today it mostly comes down to building authority on certain topic and having high quality relevant information for those topics.
How does the search engine determine what is relevant?
Search engines crawl your website and save information about your webpages into their database. Looking at the words and sentences on a webpage, they can determine if it’s relevant for what the searcher is searching for.
If you have multiple pages and articles on your website talking about the same topic, it’s an additional hint to the search engine about relevance of your website in relation to the searcher’s query.
How does the search engine determine if your website provides quality results?
This is a much more complex decision for the search engine. There are many factors that go into this:
- The number and quality of websites that link to yours.
- How people engage with your site. Do they find the information they need? Or do they ignore your site.
- How long people spend on your site.. if you are keeping them on your site for longer, they probably are getting increasing value from you on your site.
- Your site’s loading speed and mobile optimization (i.e. is the website accessible from phones).
- How much unique content you have - this means content that is unique to you.