SEO Is About Accurately Labeling

Feb 2, 2010

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Search engine optimization has evolved over time as the technology that search engines use has evolved, however there are still the basics of how search engines operate. Search engines were built by men who like all people use the same brain that we all have and that means that their brains do what ours do which is try to put things in a filing system. The human brain is one of the most complex filing systems known to man and it is that same filing system that built the algorithms and technology behind search engines under the hood. The biggest part of how search engines operate is like a huge filing cabinet. I often use the metaphor that search engines are like the old card catalog system that was used in libraries before computers came onto the scene.
card catalog with drawer out

A search engines goal and mission is to organize the world’s information that is online. The easiest way to do that is to crawl the individual files and to determine how they are labeled just like a book would be labeled in a library with the authors last name and name of the book. The better a book was labeled in the card catalog system the easier it was to find the book. The same is true in performing SEO for a website and its pages. Search engines crawl, index, and rank individual pages which means that a website with 100 pages could potentially have 100 pages showing up for different search queries. The easiest way to get those pages to show up for the different queries is to accurately label them so that the search engine can properly crawl, index, and rank that page. There are specific parts on a web file that you can put in the accurate label and that is in the title, meta description, url, heading tags, image file names, alt tags with images, navigational menu and internal links. All of these sections of a web file is what a search engine will look at to help it determine what the file is about. I see so many web files that do not think of this labeling filing system that search engines use. Now this is not all that SEO is about but it is a huge factor when if the person in charge of the file does not accurately label it then why would a search engine know what the owner wants the file to be.
card catalog card black and white

In conclusion remember that the easiest way to think of a search engine is the same way we use to use the card catalog system back in the day in the school libraries. A search engines job is to help people find the right file, your job as a website owner is to accurately label your files.

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