inbound-marketing

Getting Found in Google59rest of this chapter looks at the basics of SEO and how youcan leverage this practice to get more visitors to your website.A (Brief) Introduction to How Google WorksTo succeed with search engine optimization (SEO), and rankfor keywords you care about, it’s necessary to understand alittle about how Google works.Google does two basic things. First, it crawls the Internetlooking for web pages, storing these pages in its index.Think of the Google index as a massive catalog (much likea library would have a catalog of every book). Second, ithas software that processes user searches and finds the bestmatching web pages from its catalog.In order for your web page to rank well in Google fora given keyword, two things need to happen. First, Googleneeds to crawl and index your web page. If your web pageisn’t being crawled, you’re not even in the race! Then, ofall the possible web pages that Google thinks is a match forthe keyword being searched, your page or pages have to beconsidered better than the other possible candidates.Getting Google to visit a Web page and index it is not ashard to do as it once was. In the early days of SEO, it wasoften necessary to manually submit new web pages to thesearch engines so they would know these pages existed.Many SEO consultants and software tools offered this as aservice called search engine submission. Today, manual submissionof pages is rarely necessary. Instead, simply gettinga link to a new web page from a page that is already beingcrawled by Google is sufficient to get the new page crawledas well. That’s how most new pages get into the Googleindex today. If you do decide you want to manually submit