Search Engine Optimization Tutorial: Mastering SEO Essentials

• Quality of traffic: Visitors are genuinely interested in your product or service. Since you are interested in a pearl necklace, you are a high-quality type of traffic for jewelry stores near your location.
• Quantity of traffic: If the quality of the visits is ideal, more traffic is always better. For the example mentioned above, the more people like you that visit the page, the better. Because you are most likely going to convert.
• Organic results: all the traffic you do not have to pay for. If you decide to click on one of the options that is not an ad, your click becomes part of an organic result. The jewelry store you clicked on didn’t have to pay for your click; they caught your attention because they stood out from the competition.

You may be wondering now, how does SEO work?

Every search engine has a crawler – a series of internet bots that systematically browses the World Wide Web triggered every time you hit the search button.

Crawlers return the information to the search engines and build an index.

Then, an algorithm - a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer - matches all the data with your query.

Factors affecting SEO

Several factors are considered important when speaking of a search engine’s algorithm. A group of experts ranked their importance regarding the SE (Search Engine) part of SEO:

• Domain-level, link authority features: (e.g., quality of links to the domain, trust/quality of links to the domain, domain-level page rank, etc.) – 20.94%
• Page-level link features: (e.g. Page rank, trust, quantity of link links, anchor text distribution, quality of sources, etc.) – 19.15%
• Page-level keyword and content features: (e.g., topic modeling scores on content, content quality/relevance, etc.) – 14.94%
• Page-level, keyword, agnostic features (e.g., content length, readability, uniqueness, load speed, etc.) – 9.8%
• Domain-level brand features: (e.g., offline usage of brand-domain name, mentions of brand/domain in news/media/press, entity association, etc.) – 8.59%
• User, usage & traffic/query data: (e.g., traffic/usage signals from browsers/toolbars/clickstream, quantity/diversity/CTR of queries, etc.) – 8.06%
• Social metrics: (e.g., quantity/quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc.) – 7.24%
• Domain-level keyword usage (e.g., exact-match keyword domains, partial-keyword matches, etc.) – 6.98%
• Domain-level keyword-agnostic features (e.g., domain name length, TLD extension, domain HTTP response time, etc.) – 5.21%