How search engine optimization works
Search engines have two major functions - crawling & building an index, and providing answers by calculating relevancy & serving results.
Citation Building UKCrawling & Building:
Imagine the World Wide Web as a network of stops in a big city subway system.
Each stop is its own unique document (usually a web page, but sometimes a PDF, JPG or other file). The search engines need a way to "crawl" the entire city and find all the stops along the way, so they use the best path available - links. "The link structure of the web serves to bind all of the pages together."
Through links, search engines' automated robots, called "crawlers," or "spiders" can reach the many billions of interconnected documents.
Once the engines find these pages, they next decipher the code from them and store selected pieces in massive hard drives, to be recalled later when needed for a search query. To accomplish the monumental task of holding billions of pages that can be accessed in a fraction of a second, the search engines have constructed datacenters all over the world.
Providing Answers:
Search engines are answer machines. When a person looks for something online, it requires the search engines to scour their corpus of billions of documents and do two things - first, return only those results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query, and second, rank those results in order of perceived usefulness. It is both "relevance" and "importance" that the process of SEO is meant to influence.
To a search engine, relevance means more than simply finding a page with the right words. In the early days of the web, search engines did not go much further than this simplistic step, and their results suffered as a consequence. Thus, through evolution, smart engineers at the engines devised better ways to find valuable results that searchers would appreciate and enjoy. Today, 100s of factors influence relevance, many of which we'll discuss throughout this guide.
How Do Search Engines Determine Importance?
Currently, the major engines typically interpret importance as popularity - the more popular a site, page or document, the more valuable the information contained therein must be. This assumption has proven fairly successful in practice, as the engines have continued to increase users' satisfaction by using metrics that interpret popularity.
How to do search engine optimization
Budget constraints put local businesses in a tough position when it comes to marketing. The situation gets worse with inbound tactics like SEO, where it's difficult to determine ROI beforehand. This was less of a problem two or three years ago, when cheap / predictable SEO was possible (even if such spam my tactics inevitably posed a threat to brand reputation).
But times have changed. Works has changed. The major algorithm updates Panda and Penguin have completely transformed the way that many perform SEO. That's what everybody seems to be saying, anyway.
Except, that's not really true. There's much more to do in SEO than content marketing. What follows are other things that you can do as a local business to make the most of the search engines.
1. Pick an Alternative to Content
Before we dive into some SEO techniques that can help you get that much needed search traffic, we need to address this question:
"Why would people link to / share / talk about my site?"
Everybody's answer these days seems to be "compelling content.".
2. Skip the Exact Match Domain Name
SEO pros know this one inside and out by now. If you're hoping your local business site is going to rank because your domain name matches the keyword people will be searching for, it does not work that way anymore. In fact, Google had an update specifically to fight this issue 3. Build an Intuitive, Responsive Website with Rich UI and UX
The average local website offers a sub-par user perspective. This is because most local businesses fail to properly anticipate what people are looking for when they visit.
Here's what I mean. Take a look at most local restaurant's websites. Here's what you'll often see:
A slideshow of happy people eating food, because slideshows are so chic.
A long-winded history of the restaurant and it's values.
Upcoming events.
