In the earlier courses you've seen in this specialization, you learned the basics of how on-page SEO works. In this lesson, I'll provide you with insight on how on-page and off-page SEO work together to drive your overall rankings and traffic. You'll remember that one key component is that search engines have to crawl the web to discover all the pages. One concept to that is that they start with your home page and they crawl all the pages on your site. Well, it works something like that although they don't usually crawl all the pages on your site at one time. And it might actually take them any number of weeks or months actually to get through them all. But they sample a bunch of pages every day and the important thing to remember is that in the end they crawled a large percentage of the web to discover without that, but that only works if your site is structured the right way. And it's possible to build your content in a way where the pages aren't easily discovered. So having the right sight structure is also really important. Another thing that matters a lot is the relevance of the pages. So it only makes sense to rank your pages for search terms that are relevant to your sites. So here I have an article about Star Wars. So it wouldn't make sense to rank this for I don't know, a search about Ford Mustangs. Right? So this article has content about Star Wars, it talks about a particular movie, it's talking about the amount of money. These are all things that this particular page is relevant too. And therefore it's more likely to rank for those kinds of terms. And then lastly, you have to consider the notion of importance. So, I'm showing you here a sample search result for the search phrase milling machines. There's 974,000 pages. Why should your page be first? Well, turns out the answer to that or at least one of the most critical parts of the answer to that, is links. Links from third-party pages and third-party websites to your site act like votes for your content. You're wondering why I'm showing you this map. It's actually a map of an election in the state of Massachusetts, in which a Republican won the Senate seat. It's not really too germain to this other than this notion that links are similar to a popular election is a fairly correct one. So, in general the links help determine who ranks first. Conceptually what I'm showing you here is Amazon.com outranking Joe's Book Store because it has more links. And that's more or less true but we need to modify this a little bit further. In fact, links are not created equal. It's quite possible that a site with a small number of links could outrank a site with a large number of links if the links to Web Site A as I'm showing it here. If links to Web Site A are far more powerful than the ones to Web Site B. And a concept you're going to hear me repeat many times in this module, this notion that one link can be worth a million times more than another one. So it makes sense to pay great care to where you're getting links from. So, today's lesson I've provided you with a short summary of on page SEO. But then I tried to give you some visibility into how Links' play a role in search engine rankings. In the next lesson, I plan to dig in a bit deeper, start to show you the details of how links are valued by Google and other search engines.
