Pillars of an Effective SEO Strategy

The three pillars of SEO- Authority, Relevancy, and Technology

With the advancement of technology reaching its pinnacle, mankind’s dependence on technology has surpassed all probable bounds. There have been times when in the fleeting, anxious seconds of a mathematics exam, a student has used the calculator to confirm if the sum of five and two is seven. There also have been times when a foodie has mindlessly scrolled down hundreds of options under the food menu of a well-known restaurant or Zomato, to just give in the pangs of familiarity and gobble up the only meal s/he has outside. From figuring out locations in the same city you’ve been traveling for ten years to nervously check your exam results online — technology has provided it all.

But, how much do we know about the functioning processes and protocols of these portals? It’s like a topic that everyone pretends to know, and then no one questions its whereabouts; much like engineering. Hence, today in this article, you will learn all about Search Engine Optimization (SEO); it’s used, meaning, and pillars.

SEO is a method, or a practice, by which the quality and quantity of traffic are increased in the website that you are working on, via organic (or, unpaid) search engine results.
Together, it seems like a sentence containing words and phrases you haven’t heard in your whole life, so let’s break it up and take one step at a time.

In a lay man’s terms, SEO plans on increasing website traffic by increasing the visibility or accessibility of a web page to a web search engine user. It is the art of ranking high on a search engine in an unpaid section. So, when you type just the first letter of a word, the flair with which the search engine predicts the word(s) based on just that, is the task of SEO. This optimization targets everything from image and video search to academic research. It is an extremely important Internet Marketing strategy as optimizing a website is a herculean task. From editing font to editing content, from modifying the mark-up languages to modifying associated coding such that it increases the relevance to only appropriate keywords and removing barriers — the task of the optimizer is not at all easy, because it compels the person to devote all his concentration there. Recently, a new tactic of back-links or inbound links for promoting a particular website and it has proven immensely useful. Check out our backlink acquisition guide.

Ideally, SEO has three in-built pillars:

• Technology — This sect takes care of all the technical infrastructure of the mentioned website. This mostly includes the XML sitemaps, HTML code, HTTP status codes, etc.
• Relevance — This sect takes care of every tidbit related to the content. Title tags, Meta descriptions, headlines and most importantly, content. This is the most important pillar of optimization.
• Authority — This sect is responsible for the web engine and web user’s direct contact. It sends links and citations to the correct web engine and makes sure that the server is a trusted source. In the days that foresee online fraud, this pillar becomes extremely crucial indeed.

This approach of the three pillars of Search Engine Optimization was first given by Dave Nyler, long back in 2010.

Now let us look into each of these pillars, separately.

Technology
To have a web engine that functions within the fraction of a second, there are a few boxes that need to be checked. To make a website technology that makes sure of processing all your content to the index right away, one needs to have a properly structured URL (with an absolute absence of parameters), a clean HTML code (to prevent time lag), the correct HTTP status codes for the same kind of web pages (to reduce Not Found pages, or pages with 404 error), proper eXtensible Markup Language sitemaps, etc.

Relevance
Let me draw you a hypothetical scenario. You are in an extreme time crunch, you’re chasing a deadline (that ended an hour ago) like a madwoman while getting constant knocks from your superior when you have to search ‘Ten hacks for hackers’. Immediately, you type in ‘h’ in the search engine and the topmost result shows, ‘How to lose fat with just ONE homemade recipe.’ Every person has a threshold and that should be yours. Relevance in keyword searching is here to save you these precious seconds and your sanity. Hence, this aspect of SEO looks at the various searches you had made before to ensure proper search by engines.
This step also includes having optimized and correctly edited headlines, content, tags, title tags, focus on each page (which should be sufficient) and using the correct semantic signals.

Authority
In spite of all this, great content might not always fetch you the optimum results. The need for good content is at par with the need for a trusted source, from which the authority aspect of this optimization shoulders the whole responsibility. If you have sufficient links from various other trusted websites, the site you’re using will be viewed as trustworthy, and in turn, the search engine will promise you more optimum and relevant results.

Moving on to a slightly related topic, every such optimization requires something called Search Engine Processes (SEPs). Search engines are extremely advanced and have a super-fast processing core, but at the center, they have the same complex pieces of software that handle different aspects of a web search.

• Crawler — A crawler is usually required to spider the web, identify and follow the hyper-links and retrieve new or changed content.

The crawler is a process of the search engine discovery. It discovers changed and new content and also hyperlinks that it can find. A crawler usually initiates the process with the list of URLs that were already discovered and also with URLs that are supplied through the XML sitemaps, therefore making them so much more important and significant.

Actually to some extent a little bit measure of controlling it can be exerted. Amongst them, there are some measures of control regarding the process through which the crawl process can treat the website just by giving it orders to obey in the robots.txt files. Most of the crawlers of the search engines generally obey these orders. The crawlers can also be intercepted by their IP addresses and you can redirect those to wherever you want to go.

• Indexer — An indexer is essential for analyzing content, link graphs and to render relevant web pages for a user’s search. The next process of crawler is called the indexer or the indexing process. It analyses all the websites or rather webpages which were retrieved by the crawler process and assigns some kind of relevant value to it for the different kind of keywords that are found by it in the actual matter which is then used for purposes regarding ranking.

One other work of it is to analyze the links which are then found by the crawler process and then to compile those link graphs to complete them with values and weights which can be of great significance in the indexing of those web pages. Just like the case of the crawler, in the case of indexer to some type of measure of control is applied. It is applied over just how the indexer treats the webpages which are generally by canonicals and robotic meta tags.

• Query Engine — A query engine interprets query intent and context, retrieves the document from the index and accordingly, ranks documents. A query engine is the brain of the search engine. When the user searches for something, it is the job of the query engine to analyze and understand the motive or intent behind it and the preface of the search to deliver the best possible result. It then retrieves the most relevant result from the index itself as it finds appropriate and then applies the many rankings or factors to present the final list of the relevant web pages to the user. The intent and the context, are very important because that allows the engine and makes it capable to produce various and different kinds of results like images, news, etc. It depends on what it thinks the user wants after the search in that precise moment and what it thinks generally reflects on your search results. Various factors are taken into consideration to accurately produce those results. These things are most significantly the device that the user is using, their query intent as perceived by the engine, their search history, and other factors so that the results produced by the engine can be as relevant and as accurate as possible.

Pillars and Processes

It is very clear now though that the framework of the three pillars completely resembles the major outline of three pillars of the search engine’s processes. Now, this approach is intently made a little simple for everyone to understand the groundwork of understanding SEO.

All of these 3 pillars are created in a way that it aligns with a certain process of the search engine. What is more important is that when someone who is a practitioner of SEO understands the SE process which they are optimizing, it becomes helpful. As a result, some really important questions get answered like is some kind of major change being implemented by you to see the crawler be more efficient or for the indexer to be more sensitive to the content? Are there tactics that are needed to create better link graphs because of the indexer or just to make sure that the query understands the webpage as much more relevant in the list of results?

Many SEOs are implemented for fixing different pillars, processes, and basics of the search engine. There are also tactics to make a cross between the various pillars but the thing which surprises the most is the number of various elements of that SEO which falls in exact places in between one of the 3 main areas perfectly.

Consequently, optimizations and processes are highly interlinked. The technological issues and sect of an SEO is managed and processed by the crawler. The relevance of a search engine’s site is managed and maintained by the indexer and any checks and balances on the authority are taken care of by the query engine.

Technology requires the most support to function because it is developing faster than man-kind. This article was an extremely elementary approach to understanding the mystery of circuits and flat screens and secret codes.

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