How SEO Applies Search Engine Algorithms
Link: http://backlinko.com/seo-techniques
A tremendous amount of web traffic nowadays is derived from organic searches for given query keywords. It has then become very important for websites to optimize organic search rankings in order to increase website traffic. In order to improve rankings on search engine sites such as Google or Bing, one must have an understanding of how search engines rank websites for a given query term. Search engines have never divulged their exact methods for ranking website, since that would give websites the unrestricted ability to artificially inflate their rating on searches and thus worsen the quality of search results and wholly compromise the integrity of the search engine. Nevertheless, there exists a general understanding of how search engines work. For instance, Google’s search engine still has elements from its original PageRank algorithm. In addition, people believe that Google and other search engines utilize inbound links from other pages in order to deduce how authoritative a page is for a given topic. Even though Google’s search engine algorithm is much more complicated and uses a bevy of other factors in order to generate a ranking for a query term, applying a basic understanding of Google’s search algorithm can help improve a websites ranking on relevant searches.
One of the methods Backlinko lists for improving Google search rankings is to “link to at least 3 quality, relevant resources in every piece of content that you publish.” The reason to do this is to improve the so-called “hub score” of a website, which Google uses to compute website rank. Hubs are websites that link to authoritative websites. Google uses this algorithm as part of their overall search algorithm because websites that cite authoritative websites are likely drawing content from these credible sources, thus indicating that the website is of high quality. Backlinko also suggests adding links from highly visited pages on a given site domain to pages on that same domain that are visited less frequency. This applies Google’s hub score algorithm by including links to pages that are more authoritative, this time from internal pages within a given domain.
Another method listed on Backlinko is to find low-ranking pages on a Google Search that have high quality content, but are poorly ranked because the website have not been maintained and updated, and then to reverse engineer the content of that site to your site. Additionally, these sites may end up containing in-bound links from authoritative pages, affirming that the quality of the content of these sites is high. By reverse engineering the content on your site with the high quality content on other sites, one can gain in-bound links from reputable websites. This technique for improving Google search results applies the principle of PageRank, since the more in-bound links a given website has, the higher quality that website is.
Search engines have revolutionized how people navigate the world wide web. Nowadays, a large quantity of incoming website traffic comes from search engine results from specific keywords. Therefore, by leveraging a basic understanding of how Google generates search engine results one can increase website traffic.