Welcome back. Now that we've learned about algorithms in general, we'll break down the best practices put in place by search providers and how those lay out a road map for smart web design. We'll also talk about optimizing and over-optimizing a website to take advantage of these algorithm changes and how that can positively and negatively impact your site. Through this discussion, you'll also gain a better understanding of critical page ranking factors. Part of why algorithms evolve so frequently is due to webmasters manipulating the algorithm to obtain a high rank for a page which isn't relevant. This is part of what gives SEOs a bad name. As SEOs uncover more about the algorithm, some people over-optimize for these factors. This causes search engines to have to adjust their algorithms to account for these spammy tactics. The payday loan field is an excellent example, as Google had to create a specific update just to counter the notoriously spammy results within the payday loan space. This is why it is a good idea not to over-optimize your site it may work for a little while, but it is not viable for the long term. To ensure your site is not affected by a penalty or algorithm adjustment, it's a good idea to always follow best practices. Google has provided webmasters with a set of best practices to follow. This will help ensure websites are optimized for search. You can view these best practices in detail at the link I provided in your study materials. But I'd like to take a moment to go over the main points in this lesson. The first best practice is to make sure you provide high-quality content, especially on your homepage. From a user experience point of view, this helps users immediately understand what your website is about and how it can meet their needs. From an SEO point of view, your homepage is the page which earns the most authority on your website. This is one of the main pages that will end up bringing in search, it's important to provide information to users, but it's equally important that search engines understand what your site is about and rank it appropriately. The content on your homepage can help do this. Obtaining links from other sites is another important best practice. We will discuss think building in more detail, but basically, each link to your site earns you authority. The more high-quality links you have, the more authority your site earns. This can help your site rank better in search results. Next, it's important to ensure your site is accessible to both users and search engines. Some websites are coded in a fashion where users can see the content, but search engines cannot. This is known as cloaking and can result in penalties your website needs to be valuable from both the user's perspective and the search engine perspective. But the user experience comes first. Last but not least, it's important to have a clear hierarchy. If your website is structured in a way that makes finding inner pages difficult, or it's difficult to understand the theme in various sections of your website, this will result in a poor user experience. In addition to providing a poor user experience, it will also make it more difficult for robots to crawl in and analyze the site. Remember, these best practices are only best practices Google has released to the public. They keep the details of their algorithms pretty secret. This is to prevent gaming search results, which could result in a lot of irrelevant organic results and a loss in their user race. Through testing and monitoring changes, SEOs have been able to figure out more specific ranking factors. Keep in mind that the information Google has provided to us is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are many additional factors that lurk just beneath the surface. More information on these factors have been obtained through conferences, blogs, forums, groups that search engine representatives participate in. But most of that experience comes from SEOs continually testing their hypothesis and monitoring changes. The SEO community is great at working together to uncover ranking factors, changes that may have occurred, and helping out others in the industry. It's important to read blogs, news, and stay up-to-date on changes. Analyzing patents Google has filed also provides us with insights into how the algorithms work, as well as what changes we may see over the next few years. Patents are often filled with legal language and they can be difficult to understand. There's one SEO in the industry in particular named Bill Slawski that is great at reviewing patents and presenting his interpretation of how the information discussed in that patent has affected or may affect SEO. I would urge you to read his blog, which is called SEO by the Sea, and look at his post on patents in particular. These can be very enlightening and entertaining reads through analysis of search engine algorithms, the SEO industry hasn't covered many different ranking factors. These are divided into three key areas. On-page factors are factors within a specific page of your site. Offsite factors, such as incoming links and brand mentions, and domain or site level factors, which are signals that can affect your site as a whole. This also gets into technical SEO. Throughout this course, we will discuss each of these areas in more detail. But I wanted to provide you with a quick glimpse of important ranking factors that SEOs have uncovered over the years. While Google continuously updates our algorithm, there are occasional major algorithm changes that shake up the SEO industry quite a bit. These changes often have a big impact on individual sites as well as entire industries. Because these major changes have all been named, we can easily identify what a specific ranking factor may date to or what issues with the site might be attributed to a specific update. By attributing potential SEO issues with a specific update, we can better understand what issues are impacting a website's ability to rank and make appropriate recommendations for improving that site. While there have been many major updates in the past, I'll be discussing some of the major updates that we still frequently referred to today. These updates play a large role in the current SEO landscape. Stay tuned for the next lesson, where we will discuss each of these algorithm changes in more detail. By now, you should have a clear understanding of the importance of search engine algorithms, as well as how Google uses these algorithms to improve their search results. Understanding how Google uses these algorithms provides SEOs with information on how we can better optimize our sites and rank higher in search. Next, we will discuss specific algorithms in detail.
