of making improvements on and off your website

in order to gain more exposure in search engine results.

And that means more visitors finding you

for the right reasons.

But before we begin, let's take a step back

and understand the goals of the search engines themselves.

Search engines are really

just trying to find and understand

all the content out there on the internet,

and then quickly deliver relevant

and authoritative content

that is ultimately useful to their users.

First, let's talk about relevance.

When a user searches on something like "California travel"

search engines will analyze

all the webpages they've ever visited

and pick out the pages that they believe

are the most relevant to the term "California travel".

They determine this by evaluating web content

around lots of different factors,

including how that content is written,

how it's implemented in code,

and how other websites around the internet

are linking to it.

All this information is then stuffed

into a very big, very complex,

and very proprietary index.

Then in just a fraction of a second,

the search engine is able to use

its complex algorithms to rank and return

all of those webpages right back to the user.

And search engines make a very clear distinction

between content that's about "California travel"

versus content relevant to other phrases

like "California resorts"

or something like beach getaway.

Search engines are able to understand quite a bit

about semantic and thematic connections

between words and concepts.

Let's take another example of search query, dog crates.

Obviously, a search engine knows

that pages selling dog crates

are extremely relevant to that search query.

But it's also figured out

that websites about pet carriers are very relevant too,

and it knows their website

promoting things like pet food or dog toys

might also be relevant to the search query,

just to a lesser extent.

Next, let's talk about authority.

Basically, this means that out there

on the largely lawless worldwide web

where anyone can post anything,

can your content be trusted

so that the search engines

would want to show it to their users?

One very common way

that search engines determine authority

is by evaluating what other websites have to say

about a piece of content.

This can be measured through links

pointing to that content around the web,

references, reviews, and more.

You can think of links as a vote on the internet.

A webpage linking to your website

is just like saying,

"Hey, I trust your content enough

that I'm willing to reference your page

and even send my traffic to your site."

This vote of trust is found and stored by search engines

as they they crawl and index

all the pages of the internet.

But it's important to know

that this isn't just a popularity contest.

Search engines place an emphasis

on the quality and relevance of a link.

For example, a search engine

is more likely to trust a link

if it comes from a well respected

or industry related site,

like an industry leading blog

or nonprofit or government agency

involved in your field of work.

If you were the owner of a California travel website,

you might have links from travel review sites

or local chambers of commerce

or things like local travel bureaus.

All of that is pretty relevant.

But a link coming from a sketchy domain

that has nothing to do with you

right next to some text that says,

"I'll link to anything you want for five bucks,"

isn't going to be worth much.

So you might think of this whole system

as a weighted democracy

where some votes are worth more than others.

Understanding how important

both relevance and authority are to a search engine

will help you to ultimately improve these factors,

leading to better search engine exposure

and more visits to your own content.

(upbeat music)