Search engine optimization is a group of techniques employed by website designers and/or companies to enhance their visibility on search engines. The purpose of SEO is to ensure your site gets indexed in the search engines, as well as crawled for rankings. Google page rankings are based on relevancy.

Google's algorithms determine what is most relevant to the user based on the information typed into the search bar. One of the best descriptions of how MOZ provided search engines work. MOZ asks you to think about the internet as a subway system, with its various network of stops. In internet-speak, the stops are specific documents such as web pages.

Search engine companies like Google have little bots called spiders that will crawl around the internet trying to find all the pages that are going to be relevant to the user. Think of it like a spider crawling through the subway, finding every pathway it can to all the city subway stops.

There have to be linked for the spiders to crawl from one stop to the next. Links help the bots search billions of web documents and list them on a page based on relevance to the keywords being searched. It would take hours for the results to come up if no algorithm and links was linking specific parameters on your website to the search engine. Yet, the search engines can return results in as little as a fraction of a second because of the links, database centers, and servers.

This book covers the following topics:

• Web search
• The basics of search engines
• The different types of SEO
• Before starting SEO
• Seo strategy plan
• Keyword research
• Make an SEO friendly site
• The impacts of social media on SEO
• Content creation
• Content marketing
• Link building
• White hat & black hat SEO
• How to measure your progress
• SEO for WordPress
• Adwords
• Webmaster tools
• Search engine optimization essential tips

...And much more

A search engine is based on human creations. The algorithms that help spit out, the results have to be able to determine what is accessible and relevant to the search being conducted. Some results are more comfortable than others. If you type in the name of a celebrity like Taylor Swift, the first result will be official pages, or at least it should be. However, you can find unofficial pages, current news feeds, and much more. In fact, if you put in the singer's name, you will get her official page, Instagram account, and Wikipedia site page as the top three results. The news comes next. The results will then show her twitter account, YouTube, and Facebook pages. At least these are the results in order of appearance on the test search. The order can change because of SEO practices.

Before you begin designing your website, its content, and learning tips about SEO, take a moment to do a few searches. See what the results are. Determine if using one word versus a question provides better results.

To find out more about SEO, start reading this book now!