Search engine optimization is the bread and butter of any online business. Anyone who still doubts the effectiveness of SEO should simply take a look at the correlation between income and search engine ranking. However, for most the SEO process remains a mystery: how could it work if Google (and other search engines) keep the exact functioning of their algorithms under strict control?
A typical answer would be: SEO tools reveal strategies that can be employed to improve the ranking of search engine results pages. Of course, a natural question would still be: how can you create SEO tools if no one knows how the algorithm works? Therefore, in this article we will explain the basic development of SEO, how the data necessary to obtain knowledge is acquired, and how conventional tools are created.
SEO Basics
Simply put, SEO refers to web and content development practices aimed at improving search engine rankings. Almost all SEO revolves around the largest search engine on the web: Google. Most specialists use a wide variety of online tools to analyze and provide suggestions for possible web and content improvements.
In practice, SEO is a competitive field that revolves around knocking others out of the top positions on search engine results pages. For a long time, best practices were acquired primarily through trial and error, sharing knowledge among experts, and following public updates to Google’s search engine algorithms. Every time Google updates its algorithm (for example, The Hummingbird update), it shares the general improvements made, but not the exact details. Today, exact details (or the closest possible approximations) are obtained from Google’s large-scale data acquisition.
Basically, what SEO experts (and tool developers) can do is acquire a large amount of data from Google and start comparing their data sets. From a sufficiently large sample of relevant data, one can understand why certain pages rank better than others by reverse engineering. While insights will never be exact, they will often be close enough for practical application.
Large-scale Google data acquisition
A decade ago, Google’s large-scale data acquisition would be nearly impossible. Users would have to acquire most of the data they needed by hand or run very simple scripts that could only extract single queries.
Today, automated data extraction is becoming increasingly sophisticated, as good APIs and crawlers can acquire data from multiple pages per second. Crawlers like SERPMaster use a wide range of strategies to extract data as quickly as possible with the least possible negative impact on the website.
For Google scraping in particular, they generally accept queries from users. The scraper then goes to the queried search results page and downloads the font. Data acquired from the source is often analyzed and delivered to the interested party. All this happens in just a few seconds. Thus, companies can acquire incredible amounts of information from search engine results pages to perform any type of analysis they want.
Data creates SEO tools
By now, everything should be falling into place. As may be clear, SEO tools use Google scraping tools or services to acquire a constant stream of data. Of course, to create an SEO tool the data flow must be extremely varied, precise and consistent.
SEO tool developers crawl search engine results pages many times a day. The data is then analyzed by a service or internally to create easily digestible insights. Once analyzed, the acquired data is analyzed en masse to gain insights into the performance of websites and their content. By comparing millions of data points, some aspects of the search engine algorithm can be reverse engineered. This is the main strategy used by SEO tool giants like Ahrefs, Moz or Mangools. Of course, they never reveal their exact inner workings (especially how they analyze data), but they all rely on the same basic mechanism: Google scraping.
These SEO tools then sell access to their databases and information to help experts create the most optimized content for search engines. SEO specialists constantly use these databases to analyze pages, compare them with the competition, and use the data to occupy the best positions on search engine results pages.
One thing to keep in mind is that different SEO tools will often show slightly different conclusions or suggestions. Since no one really knows how Google’s search algorithm works and the amount of data traveling through the engine is so large, the predictions can only be somewhat accurate. In most general cases, many SEO tools will agree with your suggestions. But when it comes to extreme cases, where there is not enough data collected daily (for example, urgent SEO), the predictions become more varied.
Conclusion
SEO tools are a mystery to most. Not even all SEO experts know exactly how they acquire their data and provide information. Everything is based on automated data extraction from Google and relevant websites. These SEO tool developers acquire large amounts of data from the search engine and websites to provide the best possible information about search algorithms.
Today, even smaller companies can extract data from Google for their own purposes. As scraping as a service becomes more ubiquitous, data prices have fallen significantly. As long as there is a dedicated marketing and analytics team, businesses can use Google data to make better decisions, generate more traffic, and increase revenue.
Read more Author: Freddie George Education
Categories: How to
Source: vtt.edu.vn