The internet has been around, at least to the general public, for at least the last 20 years and it has literally grown exponentially, and still is, with hundreds of thousands of web servers buzzing in closets, garages, massive server farms, and the basement. Aunt Betty’s was spotted all over the planet. In a single day there are billions of people who use the Internet to search for information and consume data in multimedia format (videos, voice, games, social networks).

The Internet has been woven into our lives to the point that there is a form of symbiosis between man and machine in such a way that if we wake up tomorrow to learn that the Internet no longer exists, we will feel a huge void and we could possibly feel like a chain smoker who has decided to quit suddenly and quit from the start!

The Internet has changed the landscape of our economy. Countless transactions occur online where people purchase products and services with the push of a button from their smartphones, tablets, and computers. These “online stores” are always open and can be accessed from anywhere in the world, once you have access to an Internet connection. However, how do people find what they are looking for? Mainly through search engines, and this is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes in. SEO is simply a process by which a web page is created with the ultimate goal of appearing on the first page of a search engine (like Google, for example) and as high as possible on that first page when a word is entered. objective key in the search. search engine bar. A simple example would be if you had created a website about baby toys and the target keyword for which you would like your website to rank on the first page of Google could be “baby toys”.

Each of the major search engine providers has defined a mathematical algorithm that is used to determine how web pages are ranked. No one knows what that algorithm is (for good reason) and these algorithms are frequently updated with the main goal of removing poor quality content websites that are ranked high. You see, there are a lot of people who don’t want to waste time creating quality content. Instead, these guys will go for all sorts of shortcuts to try and rank high so they can make quick money selling products to people. However, thanks to the work of our search engine providers, this type of activity has been controlled and virtually eradicated and the fight will continue to ensure that people get the best high-quality content they are looking for.

Now, let’s see how search engines know what’s out there. The Internet is made up of billions and billions of web pages and search engines take advantage of things called “spiders” and “crawlers” that spend all day and night scouring all these pages to find newly created web pages. When a new web page is found, these spiders read the content and then index it within these massive databases found all over the planet. When this content is indexed, the search engine assigns a set of keywords to that content that pretty much tells you what kind of information is available on that page. This is why it is important to have keywords that are closely related to the content you are creating so that it is correctly indexed in the search engine database.

I love analogies so I’ll use one here. Spiders and trackers can be analogous to subways that stop at each station (the station would be a web page) within a complex network of subways. Whenever a train stops at a station, information about that station is recorded and indexed in a search engine database.

Now the reason there are search engine databases located all over the world on super fast, high-end computers is because of the fact that we live in a world of instant gratification. In other words, we are used to the fact that we can enter a search term in the Google search bar and get results in less than a second. If the results take longer than 2-3 seconds to appear on the screen, we get frustrated! I must say that we have come a long way from taking the bus to the public library and then taking 20 minutes to find the perfect book on a topic we are researching!

Before finishing this article for today, I just wanted to cover how search engines rank web pages for a particular keyword, as there are cases where there are hundreds and even thousands of web pages that are generally competing for one of the top keywords. ten spaces on a search results page. based on a particular keyword. So how is the ranking done? There are two factors at play here: relevance and popularity. The main goal of search engines is to provide the search engine with the most relevant content that is linked to the keyword you enter so that you do not have to do another search, for example, if I type “2015 Green Ford Mustangs”, I want to see the sites relevant websites that provide me with information on 2015 green Ford Mustangs (e.g. green Ford Mustang specs, videos, cars for sale, etc.). When we look at popularity, the search engine measures how popular the website hosting the content is, as well as the website itself. Do viewers stay on the web page long enough to read the content? Do people return to the site to consume more content? How many backlinks are driving traffic (real people) to that view? Etc …

This concludes the end of part 1 and I hope you got some kind of value out of it. At the end of the day, if you are thinking of creating a website and you want to get a very good ranking with the likes of Google, just focus on being yourself, write very good and original content (without copying from other sites) and make sure that The content is highly relevant to your target keywords, so if your target keywords are baby clothes, then your content is better about baby clothes and not baby toys for example. Lastly, in addition to creating great content, you need to make sure you distribute it and let the world know that your fabulous website exists.