Learn SEO or Search Engine Optimization for free in this detailed course or SEO Tutorial for Beginners by WsCube Tech. Starting from what is SEO and how it works, this free SEO course covers all aspects comprehensively.
Effective Search Engine Optimization is the secret behind ranking a website on the first page of Google for specific search queries or keywords. As every business has a website today, improving its ranking to bring potential customers and beat competitors is crucial. With the right SEO strategy, you can do that.
What is SEO and How Does it Work?
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it is the process of improving the ranking of a site on search engine result pages (SERP). For example, when people search for anything related to your business, you would want your site to appear first. This can be achieved with solid SEO.
If you want to learn SEO skills and understand how to improve website ranking on Google, then this search engine optimization tutorial for beginners is for you.
00:00We're going to start this series with a little history lesson.
00:09Why?
00:10Because understanding how SEO used to work, how it has progressed, and what you now need to avoid,
00:16is a very good way of creating context and helping you to understand what SEO means today.
00:24When SEO was first born, Google's algorithm was a lot simpler and manipulating it to your own ends was a lot easier as a result.
00:32Back then, Google looked at two key factors in determining its rankings.
00:37Those factors were keyword density and links profile.
00:44Your links profile, also called your backlinks profile,
00:48is essentially determined by how many links you have pointing to your website, coming from other sites.
00:54This serves two important roles.
00:56Firstly, links help Google's robots to find your website.
01:00Bots crawl the web by reading content and following links from one site to another.
01:06If you have a link on a site that Google has already indexed, then this will allow it to find yours and add it to the network.
01:13At the same time, Google views links as testimony, assuming that a website would only link to another website
01:21if it thought said website was good and had something valuable to offer its users.
01:26Google would also assume that if you have links from 20 websites about hats,
01:31then your site is probably going to be about hats as well, especially if the anchor text has your search phrase in it.
01:38The other factor was keyword density.
01:41Keyword density meant how many times your website would repeat the words that you were trying to rank for.
01:47The more content you had and the more often you repeated the same phrase throughout that content,
01:53the more likely you would ultimately be to get ranked for that search term and to show up high in the SERPs.
01:59Of course, it was also important to research the keywords and to make sure they were actually being searched for.
02:06For this, marketers could use Google's keyword research tool in order to check the volume of searches and to get an idea about how much competition there was.
02:16A savvy optimizer would then be able to look at terms with the highest search volumes and lowest amount of competition and then try to rank for those phrases specifically.
02:28This simple algorithm makes a lot of sense in theory and should have helped Google to find content that people would be looking for quickly and easily.
02:38It would read the content in order to see which site was the most relevant for that term and it would look at which sites had the most links from other websites.
02:46But the problem was, people eventually cottoned on to the way this worked and began to take advantage of it.
02:53Search engine optimizers realized that all they had to do to get to the top of Google was to create as many links and as much content as possible.
03:04So webmasters began to spam link directories and content farms, submitting their links everywhere they possibly could.
03:12They began to pay other content creators to place links on their pages and they would also trade links.
03:18Most websites ended up with a massive list of links somewhere on one of their pages.
03:23And these would just be other random sites that had contacted them and asked to exchange links.
03:29Worse was what started to happen to content.
03:34In a bid to create as much content as possible and to use the keywords as often as possible,
03:40creators began to churn out content in huge quantities while giving no regard to quality.
03:46They also began using keyword stuffing which essentially means repeating keywords over and over again even when it doesn't make any sense.
03:54A typical website from the early 2000s might read,
03:58Are you looking to buy hats online?
04:01Then you have come to the right buy hats online website.
04:04This is the best place to buy hats online for anyone who wants to buy hats online Carolina.
04:11As you can see, this content is completely nonsensical and will be highly off-putting for any real visitors looking to make a purchase.
04:19And then it got worse still.
04:22Creators began to actively steal content from other site owners and spin it in order to make it unique.
04:29Now Google won't rank duplicate content otherwise it would risk making every search result identical.
04:35So content spinning, as it came to be called, essentially means that you're taking an article or a blog post and using software in order to exchange many of the words for synonyms.
04:47So a sentence that read, these are the softest, warmest and most attractive hats on the net, would become, these are the most comfortable, most insulating and most beautiful hats on the web.
04:59And because the site owner didn't have to write that content themselves, this meant they could publish thousands of posts in a short space of time and bomb Google.
05:08Well, that's the theory at least.
05:14The reality is that, unfortunately, most spinners do this instead.
05:18These is the squitty-ish, hottest and very best beautiful hats on the fishing net.
05:24Again, it's just gibberish.
05:27So, by placing thousands of links on other sites, using their keywords as the anchor text, and by filling their sites with tons of useless content, website owners were able to get themselves to the top spot of Google.
05:41This system was so easy to abuse that some people could even get completely unrelated websites to the top of specific SERPs against the owner's will.
05:51You could make it so that searching for Big Idiot would bring up a picture of your friend, for example.
05:58This was called a Google bomb.
06:01Obviously, this started to make a mess of Google's results, and so Google had to adapt and get smarter.
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