In part 3, we’ll continue to look at another SEO definition and description to help answer your question ‘What is SEO?’
Let’s first look at another part of interpreting a searcher’s query: freshness.
For example, if you search for “Boris Johnson”, Google understands that people probably want some recent news, over say a biography.
So they give priority in their top stories widget from reputable news sources like the BBC. They also understand that if you’re looking for something like “best microphones,” then you likely want fresh information since new models and manufacturers are always bringing out new models.
And you can identify this right in Google’s search results seeing as all top-ranking pages have the current year in the title.
Most, if not all of the things we’ve covered here can be summed up as the SEO definition often referred to as “search intent,” which basically means the reason behind a searcher’s query.
This is arguably one of the most important things to master as an SEO. If you’re unable to match the searcher’s intent, in terms of content type and format, your chances of ranking are slim.
But there are additional layers to understand how Google works, which we’ll look at next.
This leads us nicely into how Google identifies relevance through content on a web page.
In the most basic form, search engines will look at the content of the page to see if the words on that page are relevant to your query, but they’re sophisticated enough to go beyond “exact match keywords.”
Google understands related keywords too. A page increases in relevance with other semantically similar keywords.
For example, if you have an article on how to pass your driving test, you may have subsections on passing your test for cars, motorbikes, HGV, LGV etc. These are all vehicles and should have keyword overlaps that help connect the topic as a whole.
SEO description examples like “road,” “driving,” “seatbelt,” “safety,” “exam,” and “test,” would all be semantically relevant keywords that can help search engines better understand what your post is about.
Another example would be if you were creating a post on the “best luxury jewellery”, the content of the top-ranking pages that almost certainly include the brand’s Tiffany and Cartier.
Other popular luxury brands would also be present, and likely have jewellery related words like “necklace, diamond, gold, ring, bracelet etc.
Rather than returning results that have the “best luxury jewellery” written 50 times on the page, Google can see which pages are the most relevant to the searcher’s request.
And Google themselves confirm this by saying “These relevance signals help search algorithms assess whether a webpage contains an answer to your search query, rather than just repeating the same question.”
Another important factor Google looks at when defining SEO is the “quality of content.” Google tries to prioritise and rank the most reliable sources.
While “quality content,” is impossible to objectively nail 100%, they use broad categories to help identify quality pages. These are, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness on a given topic; Also known as EAT.
One signal that Google mentions are getting websites to link to your content, which SEOs call backlinks. Links build up a page’s “authoritativeness,” which is outlined in Google’s famous patent on PageRank.
From a general view, think of backlinks as votes. When people link to your pages, they’re essentially vouching for your content and telling their readers that they should check out your page for more information.
Now, to prevent people from “playing” the system, Google uses spam algorithms to try and identify deceptive or manipulative behaviour.
One example would be “link exchanges,” meaning you contact other webmasters and ask them to link to you. And in return, you’ll link to them.
Google’s search quality rating guidelines has thousands of words on how they assess “quality content”, but the clue is in the first word: quality.
In Part 4 of this SEO guide (What is SEO Optimisation), we’ll continue to ask how SEO is defined and give more SEO description examples.
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