F E AT U R E A R T I C L E
in search engine results (remember the page one
we touched upon earlier?). These are the ‘free’ or
‘editorial’ results.
Why You Need to Bother with Search?
and honed by the trillions of queries that pass through
Google’s machines each year. Google also improves its
ability to understand the context of the searched
queries and content available online, based on a
technique called Machine Learning by each passing
query. It is important to know that search results vary
based on location, device and even time of day or year.
Where to Begin?
According to Google (the largest search engine), 60%
of the leisure travellers and 55% business travellers
start their travel journey using a search engine. Since
these are ‘intent driven’ queries, conversion from here
is much higher than other marketing channels. And
that in summary is why it all matters.
Yahoo and Bing are other search engines of
prominence, while in China, Baidu leads search.
How Search Engines Work?
If you’ve ever searched for something online, you
already probably know more about SEO than you
think. In a nutshell, in order for a search engine such
as Google to answer a query, it needs to:
• Know that you (business website) exist and are
‘search friendly’
• Have valuable content about topic that you want to
rank on
• Build authority and trust by factor such as links
from other websites
In order to produce the search results, search
engines send ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ that crawl your
website (not quite as scary as the real creatures!), store
information from it in their data centers or servers
around the world and when a search query comes up,
it refers to this stored data to find the most useful or
relevant result or answer.
Search engines use hundreds of mathematically
estimated algorithms and factors, to find content that
is most relevant for the query.
For the purpose of this article and series, we’ll focus
on Google, the top search engine outside of China.
When a query is typed into the search bar, Google
uses a technology called Artificial Intelligence to
understand your query and Knowledge Graph to
respond to the query. This knowledge bank is built
To ‘optimise’ your website – or make it search engine
friendly – is a combined effort between technical
improvements and front-end content.
Over the next few weeks, we will take you through
a step-by-step guide on how to improve your search
results. This includes:
Making your website search friendly via links,
XML Maps, good URL structure, site access and
providing a good user experience.
Deliver valuable content firstly by creating content
for users and not search engines. This is crucial if you
want to improve your backlinks and social shares.
We will look at keywords, what role tags and meta
information play in your SEO efforts. Link building
or off-page optimisation needs to be considered.
Last, how do you measure success? Tools to use
and understanding the insights.
What’s your burning SEO question you’d like answered over this
series? Email us at [email protected].
www.staah.com
Better Revenue I Better Industry I APAC I www.revenuemanagement.com.au
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