Search Engine Results

The explicit goal of an SEO campaign is to increase a client's ranking in the SERP returned when a user requests information about a topic the client has authority on.

In order to understand how the components of an SEO campaign contributed to results visible by the client, one should understand the process by which search engines order the results presented to their users. The information below is based upon obvservation of Google's search engine, though these are theories about general principles which any search engine tries to emulate. The goal of any search engine is to provide the fastest access to the most accurate version of the information that its user requests.

These principles attempt to describe an ideal scenario. Real-world examples will have only parts of the components listed below. Therefore it is important for the SEOer to make available as many pieces of information about their client available as possible. This contributes to a more robust internet ecosystem, more valuable sites, and ultimately more relevant results for search engine users.

The Index

Before they can be used, search engines first need to compile a database of every webpage which they wish to potentially return as a result. This is called the index, and any future references containing that term will refer to this definition (es.g. noindex, unindexible) The information contained in the index includes:

  • Information on the page and the frequency of key words (key words are terms that the engine determines as most closely-related to the page/site's purpose)
  • Page meta-information
    • Title
    • Description
    • Structured data
    • Site security
    • Site load speed
    • Age of page
    • Time since last updated
    • Page author
  • Pages linking to the page in question
    • Social network pages (frequency of links, last link date)
    • Review site pages (number of links, average review)
    • Other webpages (number of links, authority of linking page)
  • Conglomerate data
    • The larger entity which the page represents
    • The impression of that larger entity based on social networks, review sites, &c
  • Page authority: With all this information indexed, the engine can compare the page on a normalized scale against other related pages and determine the page's 'authority' "does this page seem qualified to make a statement about its most-keyworded subjects?"

A search engine result page is generated when the search engine receives input from the user.

This input includes:

  • User query (e.g. taco shop)
  • User location (guessed based on IP or explicitly given by device)
  • User history (sites visited, search results clicked on)
  • User intent (guessed based on: sites visited, searches performed, ads clicked on, interests explicitly specified in social profiles or implied by history)

When the search engine receives a query, it compiles these pieces of information and puts them through its algorithm to determine the order in which they appear to the user. The user input is matched against the index to determine which pages have more valuable information, and are therefore more relevant to the user. The pages that the algorithm determines as most relevant appear first.

This algorithm is the most valuable part of a search engine. Someone with access to the algorithm could determine precisely how to appear first more often. Sites such as Moz compile their data on which factors contribute to higher rankings but this is always correlative and never authoritative.

The role of the SEOer is to manipulate factors contributing to their client's search ranking.