Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is one of the most confusing aspects of online marketing for small business owners.  You keep hearing everywhere that it's the most important investment for you to make so that your website will show up for people doing searches, but you don't know what it is and you aren't sure if you should be investing in it or not.

So in this article, I'm going to review the three main components behind how search engines like Google do what they do, and give you some insights into why that matters for your business.

How a Search Engine Gets to Know You

Step #1 - Crawls Your Site

When a search engine is getting your know your site for the first time, it starts by crawling it.  This step is all about it acquiring data about you.  At a bare minimum, it will be looking at:

Modern search engines, like Google, will also take that a step further and do things like:

A search engine spider is responsible for doing the crawling.  This is an automated program that reads your site very quickly.  It will run through every page of your site as well as any pages that you link to from those pages.

The spiders are constantly shuffling through the internet reading pages.  If a page has been crawled before, then it might not crawl it again right away.  It may just put it into the queue to crawl again at a future date.  How often the spider will revisit your depends on a lot of factors, and Google doesn't disclose what all of those are.  However, we do know that if you are updating or adding to your site on a regular basis, then you will be scanned more regularly.  This is why blogging has such a big impact on search rank.  We also know that sites with higher amounts of traffic will be crawled more regularly, and that's why social media marketing helps your rank too by driving more traffic to your site outside of just showing up in search results.

Step #2 - Indexes Your Site

During this stage, the search engine is taking all of the data that it gathered while it was crawling your site, and it's storing it in a huge database.  That sounds super simple, but it really isn't.

Imagine if you trying to make a list of every website that you visited over the past year, and that you wanted to store as much data about each one as you could.  But you also wanted to organize it in a way that would make it fast and easy for you to find one again if you needed to look at it for something.  That's basically what Google is doing on a very small scale.

There is literally petabytes of information that Google stores in many data centers around the world.

Step #3 - Rank You, and Display You to Searchers

Now that it knows all about your site, and has that information filed away, it's time to help people find you.

This is where most business owners get confused.  They assume that Google cares about their business and their site.  But the reality is that Google only cares about you if you are relevant to the person that did a search.  Google's job as a search engine is to connect people conducting a search with results that they will like and will meet their needs.

As soon as someone does a search, Google instantly compares your site pages to billions of other pages in its index.  The algorithm behind the ranking is top secret, so nobody really knows what it is.  We do know what some factors are, though.  For example, Google released a statement that mobile-friendliness would be a significant ranking factor.  So it's a good idea to make sure your site meets the criteria we do know is important.

So if you want to be at the top of the search results, you have to anticipate what the people you want to reach might be searching for, and you have to deliver information to match those results.  This is why aiming for things that are super generic like "Chattanooga chiropractor" isn't likely to improve your ranking.  You have too much competition for those easy keywords.  But if you write content for other search terms, such as "migraine pain relief in Chattanooga", then you won't has much competition and will rank higher.

You Can't Take Shortcuts!

Throughout the history of the internet, people have been trying to hack the algorithms and get themselves to the top.  But search engines are constantly evolving to beat them.  So it's important to understand that you can't game the system.  If you do, it will catch up to you.  And the engines will blacklist your site - meaning that NONE of your pages will search up in search results.  So stick to writing content people love and using natural language in what you write, and you'll be ok.

What All of That Means for You

So if you made it this far and you aren't banging your head against your keyboard, then you have my applause! :)

It's important to at least have a basic understand of how a search engine works so you can understand out how SEO - or the process of optimizing your content for a search engine - works to help you.  So that we've got that out of the way, let's focus on you.

Optimizing is All About Translation

One super common misconception is that SEO is all about metadata and keywords and "behind the scenes" stuff in the back end that you can't see.  While that's part of it... it's really only a small part.

Let's assume for a second that you didn't do any of that background stuff.  A search spider could still figure out what your site is about and add you to its index.  That's because it will still read the words on your page and the way they are arranged.  It prioritizes some of the content over others.  For example: text  higher up on the page is more important than text towards the bottom because it's what a human would read first.  Headings are more important than normal text because they are generally indicating what the following section is all about.  Page titles are super important because they quickly sum up what the whole thing is all about.

So all of those things matter when you are writing content - even if you don't do the background stuff!

The metadata information is just designed to make sure that nothing is lost in translation.  You don't want Google to think you are talking about one thing when you meant something else.  So that's why you put some of the information into the background of the pages and format it in a way that is universally recognized by all spiders.