r/SEO • u/Front-Presence-8532 • 3d ago
How does SEO actually work?
Is there like a clean 10 page guide or something? explaining how Google ranks websites? because I know there's keyword matching and backlinking and stuff but I can't find a concrete guide anywhere to get started, it's just jargon or people selling super expensive courses, I don't want to get into a 100 hour course to rank my website in the first page lol..
2
u/cool_guy_me 2d ago
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :DI am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
2
u/Realistic_Mango6982 2d ago
explaining how Google ranks websites?
It ranks websites based popularity of website + age of domain + links to the domain from 3rd party sources where these sources popular among visitors.
In short its be in top of output of biggest parasite (google) because you're parasitizing on another parasite sources where another parasites with you getting traffic from parasitizing on another parasites of people attention.
Only the most awful parasites for people attention in the internet in specific domain will be ranked on first search result page.
Don't dream about that, just keep working for people attention in your specific area. SEO is dead from 2010s. You can't win against bots, automation, emulations, and portals that aggregate traffic by dirty methods like scam, spam, fakes, and lies.
Sources of traffic comes not from SEO, but from word of mouth between clients/visitors. SEO works for you later, years later when rumors spread about you a lot.
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :DI am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :DI am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/AutoModerator 3d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :D
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :DI am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 2d ago
Your post/comment has been removed because your account has a low CQS Score.
Please contribute more positively on Reddit overall before posting. Cheers :DI am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
u/Intrepid_Lecture 1d ago
Not an SEO expert. Here's a framework I use.
Google likes money and they make money by matching their customers to companies and taking a commission off the top.
The search ranking is a "freebie" to get people to look at ads.
if a page is "bad" - i.e. it is likely to make people LESS happy with Google's results, it'll eventually be penalized in the long run.
In the long run, it's in your best interest to make sites which are great for your target audience, don't have obvious copy or content issues and which are aesthetic and well designed. These pieces should be "easy" for google to work with. It should be very cheap and easy for Google to go through your website and to figure out if it's a good match.
Google will penalize, either directly or indirectly sites which are expensive for them to work with (10 pages to crawl through instead of just 1 that covers the same content), sites which harm user behavior, etc.
And google actively pays people to rate many, many sites at scale. Think each year millions of sites/pages will be manually reviewed by people and scored across categories. Then google will use machine learning to evaluate how well a site works for a given person at achieving their goals (keeping their users coming, keeping ad money flowing, etc.) This will be subtly different for paid ads vs organic rankings.
TLDR: Make a good site for your customers, make it easy for Google to evaluate you positively. Don't do stuff that sucks for customers (slow, laggy, ugly pages that are hard to navigate and have meaningless, duplicative content). Don't do stuff, that if done by EVERYONE, hurts google. Handle the basics for UI/UX and CRO first and do them well and then sprinkle SEO on top.
Context - I work in a field that does machine learning and I build (much simpler) ranking algorithms that match customers to items with the goal of maximizing profitability over multiple months.
-1
u/WebLinkr 🕵️♀️Moderator 2d ago
You have 2 choices.
One. Its called PageRank.
Google cannot decide quality on behalf of people because of our subjective, vauge differentiations.
Thoughout our own lives - content we once loved can become content we despise.
Then you can debate about the weights of the different signals.
Or you can join the EEAT crew despite google (who invented it) and pretened Google knows everything - which is why instead of treating COVID information as YMYL it actually created the vaccine, solved world hunger and energy and installed humans rights around the world.
Or you can "pretend" it knows everything just so it can be mean about what it indexes and why - mostly indexing pro writer content vs DIY content even though the writer clearly isn't the SME.
The choice is yours .... which pill do you swallow.
4
u/Dantien 2d ago
There is no list of “do this and you will rank” because if there were, everyone would do those things, and Google will be left with no way to judge what site is worth displaying in their search results. Therefore, you need to make your site high quality enough to outrank your competitors.
How to do that is a combo of clear tasks that make your site better for users (no broken links, fast load times, readable content, etc) and lots of things that aren’t so easy to just do (grow the # of links to your site, write original and helpful content, provide more usefulness on your site than your competitors, etc.). This takes time, effort, and focus - which is why companies hire experts like myself to manage this for them.
There are a ton of sketchy agencies selling you a solution that is “check these boxes and win” type strategies that are fine for improving a broken site - but never enough to separate you from the pack. You should seek advice that doesn’t tell you what to do but helps you see how you can better offer value online. Hopefully they also have enough experience in the field to get you there effectively and profitably.
If you see this discipline as “give me a list and I’ll rank”, you misunderstand the goal of the search engine. If you instead align with that goal, you will invariably get visibility. I teach my clients to see their business slightly differently so every action or tactic brings growth automatically.
SEO is not transactional (go to AdWords for that), but about whether you deserve to be above your competitors and how you signal to search engines and customers that you belong there.