SEO is a strategy or set of tactical operations designed to gain and grow organic traffic (often termed free traffic) from a search engine. Read the rest of our “What is SEO?” page.
How does SEO work?
SEO works by building the best solution to a search query. Often posed as a Question/Answer scenario, because people are typically looking for a solution or answer to a question. People could be looking for a solution on how to buy something, what the best solution/product or vendor is.
Crawling
Search Engines find URLs (web page links) in web pages and other documents (xml sitemaps, pdf documents, word and other office documents, pdfs and even browser address bars).
There are many signals and hints – in fact over 200 – that Google uses to store, index, and rank web pages. We made a small list of things that people have said or written about SEO:
| Signal/Hint | Meaning |
| Domain Age | How long a domain has been registered, how long the current registration is and how long its been indexed by Google |
| Backlink | Do follow backlinks help Google understand how important a web page is to others, in a sort of popularity contest. But the number of links, the weighting authority of the page linking to another and the relevance all play a role in how strong that signal is |
| PageRank | The original score of each page and domain on the web per the original “Google” patent filed by Larry Page and Sergei Brin while at the University of Stanford |
| Domain Authority | A term for ranking a domain between 0 and 100 developed by Moz (formally SEOMoz) |
| Image Optimization | Use of meta data and other techniques to rank images – very important for image libraries, stock image publishers, companies who sell products based on diagrams, ecommerce, political parties, hotels and others |
| Authority | The authority a page has on a particular term |
| ARhef text | How and what a link says about its target |
| Video Optimization | Optimizing a video for Google and/or YouTube search |
| Schema | Schema provide rich data to Google – like flight arrivals and departures, movie timetables, recipes, distances, reviews etc |
