December 3, 2024 • 12 mins
Are you trying to learn SEO (search engine optimization) but not quite sure how everything works? Then, this week's episode is going to help you. I'm breaking down how Google works as a search engine so you can understand how what you do for SEO helps you rank higher in the search results. Sometimes, it's a lot easier to do something like SEO when you understand how it all works and how your efforts pay off in the end.
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My free resources, including the Beginner's step-by-step SEO Guide and my free class, are available here.
https://www.etchedmarketing.com/freebies
Join me in Simple SEO Content, my complete SEO and Content Marketing course that teaches you what to do step-by-step. It walks you through the entire process. (complete course)
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Shure MV7 (00:00):
Hi.
Hi, and welcome back to thesimple SEO podcast.
I'm so glad that you are herewith me today.
I want to dig into how Googleworks, because I think sometimes
it's easier to kind of wrap ourheads around a concept such as
SEO or search engineoptimization.
If we really truly understandkind of how, what we're doing,
(00:23):
plays a role in the overallsuccess and kind of how
everything happens.
And I know there's a lot ofmisinformation about out there
about SEO and how it works andall of that.
So I figured why not?
Share with you, how it actuallyworks.
So Google.
As you know is a search engine.
(00:44):
People go in, they search for akeyword.
Or a key phrase.
Anywhere from one word to six orseven words, sometimes they put
in a full question and thenGoogle.
Brings up websites that itbelieves are going to be.
Closely related to that querybased on what was asked now, how
(01:04):
does Google figure out who toshow to the searcher?
Right.
So let's walk through how theinformation.
On your website ends up.
In someone's search results andthey hopefully click on your
website and come visit.
(01:24):
So when you publish new contenton your website or when you
first publish a website, Googlehas a search engine spider.
It's a crawler.
And it's name is Google bot.
And Google bot.
He goes all across the web.
And it checks out all thewebsites that it can find.
(01:45):
And it crawls from link to linkto link.
This is why link building isimportant to SEO and in the
early days, Of SEO link buildingwas critical.
It was probably the mostimportant thing that you could
do to help a website rank higherwas to build more links to it.
Excuse me.
Because.
(02:06):
Google would crawl those linksand would find the different
pages.
So where there's two differenttypes of links.
There are internal links.
Those are links on your website.
From one page on your website toanother page on your website.
And then there are externallinks.
External links are links fromyour website to a different
website.
So when you're creating content,This is why it's recommended
(02:30):
that we do something like thehub and spoke model where your
content is about one coresubject area and those blog
posts or those pieces.
Can link to each other, becauseif you think about it for a
second, Google bot is crawlinglink to link, to link.
And that's how they're indexingthe information.
(02:52):
They're crawling all thedifferent links on your website.
So when you have a blog post.
And you link to it.
And then you have another blogpost that you link to in that
blog, post Google bot finds allthose different pages, all those
different posts.
So now the Google bot has foundyour post.
That's the starting point.
(03:12):
Then, what it's going to do isto go through and look at.
The SEO elements, those placeson your page, your posts that
are supposed to have the cluesas to what the page is about.
Those are going to be your titletag and your meta description,
your header tags, your imagefile names.
Your image alt, text your URL,potentially your copy, like all
(03:36):
the different places.
Google bots going to look for akeyword on that page, in those
different places.
If you're not sure what they areor how to format them, what to
do with them.
Get the beginner's SEO guide.
It's at the freebies tab on mywebsite@hsamarketing.com forward
slash freebies.
It's got all that information.
It's going to walk you throughwhat those things are, what they
look like.
(03:57):
How to format them for SEO, allof that.
So now Google is going through.
All the different SEO elementsin each time it sees.
The same check mark.
Or the same keyword, sorry.
It's kind of like a check markfor Google bot.
Oh, this page is about this.
So it puts it in its giganticindex.
(04:18):
And it kind of marks that thispage over here, this URL over
here is about this keyword.
So now your content has beenindexed by Google bot.
So now the next time somebodygoes to Google.
And searches that key word thatGoogle bot knows that that page
is about.
(04:39):
They're more likely to show itto them in the search results
because they search for thiskeyword in Google bot goes, oh,
I have a page that's about thiskeyword.
It's right over here.
And it serves it up in theresult.
So it's a simple process.
If you think about it, Googlebot goes from link to link, to
(05:00):
link all across the web.
It clicks on the links on yourwebsite.
It clicks on the links on otherwebsites.
One link may send it to anotherpage on your website.
Another link may send it to adifferent website.
When we're talking about links.
There also are two differenttypes of links.
So we talked about internal andexternal.
(05:20):
Beyond that we also have followand no follow.
So we follow link or you may seeit marked as a do follow link.
That's one that tells Googlebot, Hey, go ahead and follow
this link.
Go on over here and explore andgo check it out.
I know, follow link.
Is one that tells Google bot,Hey, don't look at this one.
Don't follow don't come crawlover here.
(05:42):
You don't need to do it.
So what's the difference betweena follower and a no-follow.
Where my students end up runninginto this, what we see more
often than not.
Is kind of how it applies to youas a small business owner is
really in link-building and likedigital PR and earning links
back.
A follow link.
He's going to share a little bitof the domain authority from the
(06:06):
other website with your website.
So it's basically saying toGoogle, Hey, we like this
website, we're going to link toit and we want to kind of
endorse it.
It's kind of a little bit of a.
Uh, love a little bit of anendorsement.
And in time getting those withthe follow link.
We'll actually help boost yourwebsite's domain authority.
(06:29):
Which is going to generally makeit a little easier to rank for
additional keywords.
It's not a given.
It's not something from Google.
Google says, no, it doesn't comeinto play, but.
As somebody who's been in SEOfor 15 years, I can tell you.
Generally speaking.
A website that is moreauthoritative has a good number
of backlinks that are followedback links in there from
(06:52):
different.
Um, domains and all of that.
That's been around for a while.
That has good content on it, etcetera.
It's generally going to have abetter chance of ranking higher
in the search results.
Then a newer website or awebsite without a lot of links
on it.
So those follow links do oftenhelp boost your website's
(07:13):
authority.
And the intern, we generallystart to see.
That it's a little easier torank for additional keywords.
Because generally speaking,Google wants to show the best
result.
And the reality is they're notgoing to just have one website
or one URL.
That they can show to someonefor the query that they're
(07:36):
searching in the search results.
So how does Google decide.
Who shows up and in what order.
So that's where a lot of thiscomes into play and it really is
about having that authority inGoogle's eyes.
Having really great content onyour website.
Being very helpful.
Um, the things that Google islooking at and what they're
(07:56):
grading your content on now isobviously the helpful content
algorithm update, which is nowjust part of the overall Google
algorithm.
And honestly, I know people areacting like helpful content is
something new.
You guys helpful content iswhile it may not have had the
name, helpful content.
We've been talking aboutcreating great quality content.
(08:16):
Creating it for the user writingfor the user.
For 12 years, at least like thisis not new.
So anybody who's panicking orsaying, oh my gosh, helpful
content algorithm update killedmy site.
No, you didn't have goodcontent.
If you got hurt by helpfulcontent.
(08:36):
You didn't have good content.
You weren't paying attention towhat was important for Google in
the first place, because if youhad.
Good high quality content thatwas helpful to your audience.
You didn't get penalized by thatalgorithm update last fall.
The other thing that Googlelooks at and grades your content
on is E.
Experience expertise, authorityand trust.
(08:57):
So how do you show.
Eat in your content.
You share personal anecdotes,you share experience, you share.
Research you show.
Um, you talk about case studies.
You build out your authority andyour trust signals through other
(09:17):
websites or, you know, havingauthor profiles and authorship
is not really something you needto.
Optimize for today, we did atone point, but you don't have to
do that today, but authorprofiles start to show up
sometimes like in the Googleknowledge base, like if you.
Search my name.
If you search Rachel LynnTeigen.
You will see, generally speakingon the right-hand bar on Google,
(09:40):
you'll see a picture of me.
It'll say author it'll showgenerally search engine land is
the first one that it showsthere.
Sometimes it shows my website.
Sometimes it doesn't, it justkind of depends on how Google's
feeling.
Google's a little finicky.
That's an author profile that'sbecause Google knows, oh, Rachel
is an SEO industry expert.
This is what she talks about.
(10:00):
These are the things that sheaddresses.
So that's one of the ways thatit helps to build.
That authority and that trust.
With Google for my website.
Now you can't control thatGoogle just creates that
knowledge panel, that knowledgegraph that information about
you.
You cannot control that.
But what you can do.
(10:21):
Is to create great content.
No surprise.
Optimize it for the searchengine.
And then really focus onbuilding.
A good solid brand.
Make sure that you're takingcare of customers.
You've got ideally as muchpositive feedback as possible,
and you're just overall a goodbrand and your seeing positive
(10:42):
sentiment across differentchannels, and that's going to
help you.
So hopefully that makes sense.
You understand kind of howGoogle works.
What it's doing to find all theinformation, how it's
determining, who ranks, where,um, how it figures out if you're
going to rank or not.
So let me know if you have anyquestions, you can always submit
them on the Google form.
Or you can text them to the showusing that text information
(11:07):
that's in the app.
Oh, all right.
That's it for today.
I'll see you back here nextweek.
Hi.
Hi, and welcome back to thesimple SEO podcast.
I'm so glad that you are herewith me today.
I want to dig into how Googleworks, because I think sometimes
it's easier to kind of wrap ourheads around a concept such as
SEO or search engineoptimization.
If we really truly understandkind of how, what we're doing,
(00:23):
plays a role in the overallsuccess and kind of how
everything happens.
And I know there's a lot ofmisinformation about out there
about SEO and how it works andall of that.
So I figured why not?
Share with you, how it actuallyworks.
So Google.
As you know is a search engine.
(00:44):
People go in, they search for akeyword.
Or a key phrase.
Anywhere from one word to six orseven words, sometimes they put
in a full question and thenGoogle.
Brings up websites that itbelieves are going to be.
Closely related to that querybased on what was asked now, how
(01:04):
does Google figure out who toshow to the searcher?
Right.
So let's walk through how theinformation.
On your website ends up.
In someone's search results andthey hopefully click on your
website and come visit.
(01:24):
So when you publish new contenton your website or when you
first publish a website, Googlehas a search engine spider.
It's a crawler.
And it's name is Google bot.
And Google bot.
He goes all across the web.
And it checks out all thewebsites that it can find.
(01:45):
And it crawls from link to linkto link.
This is why link building isimportant to SEO and in the
early days, Of SEO link buildingwas critical.
It was probably the mostimportant thing that you could
do to help a website rank higherwas to build more links to it.
Excuse me.
Because.
(02:06):
Google would crawl those linksand would find the different
pages.
So where there's two differenttypes of links.
There are internal links.
Those are links on your website.
From one page on your website toanother page on your website.
And then there are externallinks.
External links are links fromyour website to a different
website.
So when you're creating content,This is why it's recommended
(02:30):
that we do something like thehub and spoke model where your
content is about one coresubject area and those blog
posts or those pieces.
Can link to each other, becauseif you think about it for a
second, Google bot is crawlinglink to link, to link.
And that's how they're indexingthe information.
(02:52):
They're crawling all thedifferent links on your website.
So when you have a blog post.
And you link to it.
And then you have another blogpost that you link to in that
blog, post Google bot finds allthose different pages, all those
different posts.
So now the Google bot has foundyour post.
That's the starting point.
(03:12):
Then, what it's going to do isto go through and look at.
The SEO elements, those placeson your page, your posts that
are supposed to have the cluesas to what the page is about.
Those are going to be your titletag and your meta description,
your header tags, your imagefile names.
Your image alt, text your URL,potentially your copy, like all
(03:36):
the different places.
Google bots going to look for akeyword on that page, in those
different places.
If you're not sure what they areor how to format them, what to
do with them.
Get the beginner's SEO guide.
It's at the freebies tab on mywebsite@hsamarketing.com forward
slash freebies.
It's got all that information.
It's going to walk you throughwhat those things are, what they
look like.
(03:57):
How to format them for SEO, allof that.
So now Google is going through.
All the different SEO elementsin each time it sees.
The same check mark.
Or the same keyword, sorry.
It's kind of like a check markfor Google bot.
Oh, this page is about this.
So it puts it in its giganticindex.
(04:18):
And it kind of marks that thispage over here, this URL over
here is about this keyword.
So now your content has beenindexed by Google bot.
So now the next time somebodygoes to Google.
And searches that key word thatGoogle bot knows that that page
is about.
(04:39):
They're more likely to show itto them in the search results
because they search for thiskeyword in Google bot goes, oh,
I have a page that's about thiskeyword.
It's right over here.
And it serves it up in theresult.
So it's a simple process.
If you think about it, Googlebot goes from link to link, to
(05:00):
link all across the web.
It clicks on the links on yourwebsite.
It clicks on the links on otherwebsites.
One link may send it to anotherpage on your website.
Another link may send it to adifferent website.
When we're talking about links.
There also are two differenttypes of links.
So we talked about internal andexternal.
(05:20):
Beyond that we also have followand no follow.
So we follow link or you may seeit marked as a do follow link.
That's one that tells Googlebot, Hey, go ahead and follow
this link.
Go on over here and explore andgo check it out.
I know, follow link.
Is one that tells Google bot,Hey, don't look at this one.
Don't follow don't come crawlover here.
(05:42):
You don't need to do it.
So what's the difference betweena follower and a no-follow.
Where my students end up runninginto this, what we see more
often than not.
Is kind of how it applies to youas a small business owner is
really in link-building and likedigital PR and earning links
back.
A follow link.
He's going to share a little bitof the domain authority from the
(06:06):
other website with your website.
So it's basically saying toGoogle, Hey, we like this
website, we're going to link toit and we want to kind of
endorse it.
It's kind of a little bit of a.
Uh, love a little bit of anendorsement.
And in time getting those withthe follow link.
We'll actually help boost yourwebsite's domain authority.
(06:29):
Which is going to generally makeit a little easier to rank for
additional keywords.
It's not a given.
It's not something from Google.
Google says, no, it doesn't comeinto play, but.
As somebody who's been in SEOfor 15 years, I can tell you.
Generally speaking.
A website that is moreauthoritative has a good number
of backlinks that are followedback links in there from
(06:52):
different.
Um, domains and all of that.
That's been around for a while.
That has good content on it, etcetera.
It's generally going to have abetter chance of ranking higher
in the search results.
Then a newer website or awebsite without a lot of links
on it.
So those follow links do oftenhelp boost your website's
(07:13):
authority.
And the intern, we generallystart to see.
That it's a little easier torank for additional keywords.
Because generally speaking,Google wants to show the best
result.
And the reality is they're notgoing to just have one website
or one URL.
That they can show to someonefor the query that they're
(07:36):
searching in the search results.
So how does Google decide.
Who shows up and in what order.
So that's where a lot of thiscomes into play and it really is
about having that authority inGoogle's eyes.
Having really great content onyour website.
Being very helpful.
Um, the things that Google islooking at and what they're
(07:56):
grading your content on now isobviously the helpful content
algorithm update, which is nowjust part of the overall Google
algorithm.
And honestly, I know people areacting like helpful content is
something new.
You guys helpful content iswhile it may not have had the
name, helpful content.
We've been talking aboutcreating great quality content.
(08:16):
Creating it for the user writingfor the user.
For 12 years, at least like thisis not new.
So anybody who's panicking orsaying, oh my gosh, helpful
content algorithm update killedmy site.
No, you didn't have goodcontent.
If you got hurt by helpfulcontent.
(08:36):
You didn't have good content.
You weren't paying attention towhat was important for Google in
the first place, because if youhad.
Good high quality content thatwas helpful to your audience.
You didn't get penalized by thatalgorithm update last fall.
The other thing that Googlelooks at and grades your content
on is E.
Experience expertise, authorityand trust.
(08:57):
So how do you show.
Eat in your content.
You share personal anecdotes,you share experience, you share.
Research you show.
Um, you talk about case studies.
You build out your authority andyour trust signals through other
(09:17):
websites or, you know, havingauthor profiles and authorship
is not really something you needto.
Optimize for today, we did atone point, but you don't have to
do that today, but authorprofiles start to show up
sometimes like in the Googleknowledge base, like if you.
Search my name.
If you search Rachel LynnTeigen.
You will see, generally speakingon the right-hand bar on Google,
(09:40):
you'll see a picture of me.
It'll say author it'll showgenerally search engine land is
the first one that it showsthere.
Sometimes it shows my website.
Sometimes it doesn't, it justkind of depends on how Google's
feeling.
Google's a little finicky.
That's an author profile that'sbecause Google knows, oh, Rachel
is an SEO industry expert.
This is what she talks about.
(10:00):
These are the things that sheaddresses.
So that's one of the ways thatit helps to build.
That authority and that trust.
With Google for my website.
Now you can't control thatGoogle just creates that
knowledge panel, that knowledgegraph that information about
you.
You cannot control that.
But what you can do.
(10:21):
Is to create great content.
No surprise.
Optimize it for the searchengine.
And then really focus onbuilding.
A good solid brand.
Make sure that you're takingcare of customers.
You've got ideally as muchpositive feedback as possible,
and you're just overall a goodbrand and your seeing positive
(10:42):
sentiment across differentchannels, and that's going to
help you.
So hopefully that makes sense.
You understand kind of howGoogle works.
What it's doing to find all theinformation, how it's
determining, who ranks, where,um, how it figures out if you're
going to rank or not.
So let me know if you have anyquestions, you can always submit
them on the Google form.
Or you can text them to the showusing that text information
(11:07):
that's in the app.
Oh, all right.
That's it for today.
I'll see you back here nextweek.
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