What is search engine optimization? - Google Analytics Tutorial

- Search engine optimization is the process of making improvements on and off your website in order to gain more exposure in search engine results. And that means more visitors finding you for the right reasons. But before we begin, let's take a step back and understand the goals of the search engines themselves. Search engines are really just trying to find and understand all the content out there on the internet and then quickly deliver relevant and authoritative content that is ultimately useful to their users. First, let's talk about relevance. When a user searches on something like California travel, search engines will analyze all the web pages they've ever visited and pick out the pages that they believe are the most relevant to the term California travel. They determine this by evaluating web content around lots of different factors, including how that content is written, how it's implemented in code, and how other websites around the internet are linking to it. All this information is then stuffed into a very big, very complex, and very proprietary index. Then, in just a fraction of a second, the search engine is able to use its complex algorithms to rank and return all of those webpages right back to the user. And search engines make a very clear distinction between content that's about California travel versus content relevant to other phrases like California resorts or something like beach getaway. Search engines are able to understand quite a bit about semantic and thematic connections between words and concepts. Let's take another example search query, dog crates. Obviously, a search engine knows that pages selling dog crates are extremely relevant to that search query, but it's also figured out that websites about pet carriers are very relevant too. And it knows that a website promoting things like pet food or dog toys might all also be relevant to the search query, just to a lesser extent. Next, let's talk about authority. Basically, this means that out there on the largely lawless World Wide Web, where anyone can post anything, can your content be trusted so that the search engines would want to show it to their users? One very common way that search engines determine authority is by evaluating what other websites have to say about a piece of content. This can be measured through links pointing to that content around the web, references, reviews, and more. You can think of links as a vote on the internet. A webpage linking to your website is just like saying, "Hey, I trust your content enough that I'm willing to reference your page and even send my traffic to your site." This vote of trust is found and stored by search engines as they crawl and index all the pages of the internet. But it's important to know that this isn't just a popularity contest. Search engines place an emphasis on the quality and relevance of a link. For example, a search engine is more likely to trust a link if it comes from a well-respected or industry-related site like an industry-leading blog or nonprofit or government agency involved in your field of work. If you were the owner of a California travel website, you might have links from travel review sites or local chambers of commerce, or things like local travel bureaus. All of that is pretty relevant. But a link coming from a sketchy domain that has nothing to do with you right next to some text that says, "I'll link to anything you want for five bucks." isn't going to be worth much. So you might think of this whole system as a weighted democracy, where some votes are worth more than others. Understanding how important both relevance and authority are to a search engine will help you to ultimately improve these factors, leading to better search engine exposure and more visits to your own content.