SEO can be drilled down to two main factors:

• Having relevant, unique, and fresh content on your website
• Getting websites to link to your website (back links)

How SEO Works

Search engines such as Google have software that lets them send out a “spider” which is constantly surfing the Internet at very high speeds.  The spider is constantly scanning website content and looking for web links.

Every link that the spider finds allows the spider to possible find and scan a new page.  That’s called Indexing.  Indexing means the spider found your website or web page from a link somewhere, scanned your content, and added it to Google’s huge database of content.

From that database of content Google needs to figure out how to display that information on its search engine results pages (SERPS).

That’s where the infamous Google algorithm  comes into play.  Every search engine has their own algorithm that analyzes all the content in their database and determines how it will be displayed.

That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) gets started.  SEO is the practice of setting up a website to succeed in ranking  as high as possible for a specific search term, often times called a “keyword”.  A keyword can be a single word or phrase.

There are two forms of SEO:

On Page SEO

• This is what you do to the actual website to help Google index your website better.
• Meta information – Every web page is made up of complicated HTML codes.  What we see is just words and images.  However, behind the scenes there is actually a complex architecture of “tags” that tell your browser how to display your web pages’ information.

Off Page SEO

• This is what you do to draw the attention of Google to come index your website.
• Back links – Every incoming link you have pointed to your website is like a popularity vote.  The more popular you are the higher you go in the search rankings.  Back links can also be referred as incoming links or one way links.  They are by far the most important weapon in your SEO arsenal.  A handful of back links from the right sources could be all you need to rank successfully.

• Four Types of Incoming Links
  • Tier 1 – links that come from an authority site that is highly relevant to your niche
  • Tier 2 – links that come from an authority site of any topic
  • Tier 3 – links that come from any website that is highly relevant to your niche
  • Tier 4 – links that come from any website about any topic

How do you know that a website is an authority site?  Well Google has a scoring system called PageRank.  It is a scoring system that works on a 1-10 scale.  For example, a website with a PR of 8 would be an authority site.

The last thing you need to know regarding back links is that the search engines are also looking at what the actual clickable text of the link says.  They do this to determine what the link is relative to.

For example, if you had an incoming link to your website that looked like “click here” then the search engines would think that the link was relative to the phrase “click here”.  If you want to get higher rankings for your own keywords then you need to make sure the clickable text, which is called the anchor text, includes the keywords that you are trying to get your website ranked for.

I haven’t even begun to scratch the service of what SEO is all about but I hope that this little report helps you understand the main high level concepts of how to successfully use SEO strategies to get your website highly ranked for the terms you would like to be ranked for.