A goal of a search engine is to provide its users with the most relevant web page based on the users search queries. In order to do this, a search engine's underlying functionality is an algorithm which takes thousands of factors, with different weights, found directly on a web page, and orders them in the search results based on their relevancy to the keyword or keyword phrase searched.

Search engines pair your search criteria with the most relevant search results incredibly fast because they already know most all of the web pages available and accessible online. Search engines have what are commonly known as “spiders” which scour the Internet and “index” every page found on the web to be ranked based on their relevancy to search queries.

Why are search engines like a person?

I commonly like to personify search engines when trying to explain the thought process behind how they work. Imagine you need help finding some information about Marine Biology, and you ask your friend Joe (the search engine) if he could help you find some information on the subject. Joe is going to attempt to find the most relevant information that he knows how to find about Marine Biology. Maybe this means he is going to show you a text book that he read last quarter college that is titled Marine Biology and was published 6 months ago. So the criteria that he is providing you resources based on is the subject matter (Marine Biology), his current knowledge of resources surrounding the subject matter (similar to “indexed” web pages), how current the information is (publish date), and how credible the book is (recommendation by their teacher).

These are simply generalized search factors to further illustrate the mentality behind the scenes of a search engine. So let’s talk about some tangible factors that will influence your web pages ranking within a search engine.

What will actually influence my search engine rankings?

Two of these factors, and their are many many more, that should be highly considered in your SEO efforts are 1) Keyword sensitive content and 2) back-links. Keyword sensitive content relates to the subject matter relevancy, and back-links apply to the credibility and recommendations for a web page. Think of back-links as a recommendation, which only mean something is the person (or web page) making that recommendation is relevant to your subject matter. You wouldn’t ask a manufacturing teacher about Marine Biology, would you? So why would you want your SEO company to get you back-links from a completely unrelated web site.

Do-it-yourself SEO

This is why I constantly preach to our clients that they can maintain their own SEO efforts, as long as they can understand how search engines think, so to speak. If you can write good content, that is keyword friendly, and your site is structurally sound and you can find relevant sites to link to your content, you will have 95% of what you need to do, covered in-house.

In closing, when asking your SEO company where your money is being spent...make sure they can explain exactly what they are doing to make you a relevant expert in Joe’s eyes.