Do You Understand SEO And Search Rankings?
When discussing SEO and search rankings I sometimes get the feeling that web site owners don’t really understand what is happening under the hood of their web site. Having an understanding of what search rankings are all about can help you look at SEO in a different perspective – and perhaps give you the background to understanding why you need to act on certain issues.
I think the first issue to clarify is that which concerns ‘web sites’. Web sites as a whole are not really ranked – it is individual pages that are ranked. In fact, to be more specific, individual pages are ranked according to keywords and how they compare to other pages on the web using the same keywords.
Here is a simple example. If your primary keyword is “red widget” then you should be targeting that as part of a group of keywords. “installing red widgets”, “buying red widgets”, “downloading red widgets” are examples of keyword phrases you may be targeting. Your competitors may outrank you in the search engines for the first two keyword phrases whilst you may outrank them for the third.
The reason you outrank them for the third phrase could be as simple as them not optimizing for that phrase. Perhaps you have done a better job of optimizing that phrase. What is interesting is that these three phrases could be optimized on the one page. So for two search terms, their page outranks yours but you outrank them for the third.
Search engine optimization, as the name suggests, is the art of optimizing something for the search engines. What do we optimize – we optimize web pages to gain the highest possible place in search results for queries related to that page. Our job then is to try and second guess the searcher – by doing that we are optimizing for their search terms. The aim, of course, is to appear higher in the search results than your competitors. So forget about web site rankings as such – SEO is all about individual pages and how they connect to each other all over the web.
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