Now that we’ve answered the question “what is SEO?”, it’s time to learn how search engines like Google actually work.
When you search for something in Google (or any other search engine), an algorithm works in real-time to bring you what that search engine considers the “best” result. Specifically, Google scans its index of “hundreds of billions” of pages in order to find a set of results that will best answer your search.
How does Google determine the “best” result?
Even though Google doesn’t make the inner workings of its algorithm public, based on filed patents and statements from Google, we know that websites and web pages are ranked based on:
Relevancy If you search for “chocolate chip cookie recipes”, you don’t want to see web pages about truck tires. That’s why Google looks first-and-foremost for pages that are closely related to your keyword. However, Google doesn’t simply rank “the most relevant pages at the top”. That’s because there are thousands (or even millions) of relevant pages for every search term.
For example, the keyword “cookie recipes” brings up 349 million results in Google:
So to put the results in an order that bubbles the best to the top, they rely on three other elements of their algorithm:
Authority
Authority is just like it sounds: it’s Google’s way of determining if the content is accurate and trustworthy.
The question is: how does Google know if a page is authoritative?