How does google work?

Let's start with a step by step guide to get you going with search engine optimization!

We all want to be ranked high in search engines like Google, but how do they work? Because if we don't know how they work, how will we ever be able to use them as a tool?

Google works off of the "Library" principle.

If you want to write a paper on Photography the 1st thing you would do is check out a few (lets say 5) books on the subject. After reading those books you might just turn to the bibliography and see what books your book referenced as sources of their information. If 3 of the 5 books referenced a specific book, it would be safe to assume this books was important to the subject matter. If 5 of the 5 reference a specific book we would assume this is an authority on the subject matter.

Google works the same way, but with links. Each link to your site is a vote for your site. The more sites having to do with your search terms (such as "photography") that point to your site, the more important Google views your site. The link itself is valued based of the site it comes from.

This is what is known as "page rank". Page rank is on a scale of 0 to 10. 10 being the best and reserved for a very exclusive list of sites such as CNN.com or Google itself.

For a small business a ranking of 3 to 5 is considered very good and will help you to achieve high rankings in many search engines.

Here is a link where you can check your pages "page rank."

http://www.prchecker.info/

Now that you know how Google works you have a place to start! Now I will tell you "page rank" is only a piece of the puzzle. If you only chase page rank you won't get your desired results!

In my next post I will cover your to optimize your site for Google!