Ranked as the number one best company to work for, Google gets its fair share of attention for having an amazing office. It boasts an onsite computer doctor, swim in place pools, and a salon and massage parlor, and its headquarters’ lawns are mowed by goats rented from a grazing company. Such an amazing office as the “Googleplex” could only exist for a company as ragingly successful as the search engine giant used for a majority of the world’s monthly 100 billion queries.

It’s little wonder that search engine optimization, better known as SEO, has emerged as one of the most important elements of internet marketing. Search engines like Google are used by billions of users, making them a natural starting point for companies hoping to reach larger audiences. But how can they do it? This article will provide a crash course in search engine optimization that will answer exactly that question.

How Google Works

It’s pretty simple. When a site is created, the creator of that site “indexes” it for Google. Basically, that means putting it into Google’s big old encyclopedia of internet content. That way, when a user submits a query, it can find that site, if it’s relevant. Google’s PageRank system is what determines relevancy. It looks at all kinds of information, including:

• How much that keyword is used on a site
• How often that keyword is used by other sites that link to a site
• How often that keyword is used by social media pages linking to a site
• The location and history of the user’s computer

The sites that have the highest quality and highest number of instances are ranked first on the search engine result page.

Achieving Better Rankings

Better results come from a variety of factors, but SEO tends to focus on link building as a way to boost rankings. Remember how PageRank looks at the number of times your site mentions keywords and the number of times other sites mention your site and the keyword together? That’s the focus of SEO marketing. It comes down to onsite and offsite optimization.

Onsite Optimization
This is the stuff that you do on your own site to boost relevancy. Some easy ways to optimize onsite are to include links on your site to other locations on your site and to include HTML tags. Feature your keywords prominently, especially in titles.

Offsite Optimization
This is where SEO services come into play. SEO specialists hire writers to write quality content that utilizes the keywords for which you want to be recognized with great frequency. They then create links to your site using those keywords as the anchor text. The more articles like that are posted to blogs around the web, the better your results will be.

Is It Effective?

Absolutely. Fifty seven percent of marketers say that Seo has the greatest influence on the generation of leads, and the number is only expected to grow. Mobile devices have now entered the game, making it easier for people to search more often. In fact, nearly half of mobile device users use them to look up product reviews and seek promotions, and by 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage. As more users start incorporating internet use as a major part of their daily lives, SEO will become an even more important marketing strategy.