Page 104 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

early search engines would read certain elements of a web page called metadata.
These elements, such as meta-keywords, meta-descriptions, and page titles, are
not always visible to a user. The first wave of search engines would simply
search for these elements on a web page (i.e., “crawl the web page”) and rank
the search results based on the meta-content of the websites.

At first glance, this sounds like a logical approach. However, web marketers
started to figure out how to cheat the system. They would put high traffic words
like “baseball” in their meta-keywords just to attract traffic to their website. Over
time, these tactics became known as “black hat” tactics. As these tactics became
more popular and people became pros at “tricking” the search engine into
ranking their website for a given term, the relevance of the search results to the
original search terms declined substantially. The core value of search engines
was being compromised.

Then Google came along. When devising its search engine, Google asked,
“What attribute of a website can we use to automatically determine the website's
relevance and authority?” Its conclusion was “inbound links.” An inbound link is
a hyperlink on another website that directs back to your website. I am sure you
have seen many hyperlinks. They look like this: www.yourwebsite.com. Google
figured that if a website had a lot of other people linking to it, the website being
linked to must be pretty important. It is really hard to wake up one day, start a
website, and immediately convince thousands of people to link back to it. To
make the algorithm even more effective, Google was also able to factor in the
importance of the website that was linking back to your website. For example, a
link from the Wall Street Journal would be thousands of times more impactful
than a link from your 16-year-old nephew's personal blog.

In addition to the quality and quantity of inbound links, the rise of social media
has caused Google to factor social media influence into the algorithm. If your
blog articles are often retweeted in social media, if your company's Twitter
account has lots of followers, if your company's Facebook page has lots of fans,
Google will pay attention. Just like inbound links, it is hard to fake a large
following and lots of engagement with your content. If lots of people follow you
and lots of people share your content across social media channels, Google
figures there is a good chance you are a thought leader on a given topic and
ranks you prominently in the search engine results for that topic.

In a nutshell, that is how search engines work. You need lots of inbound links.
You need lots of social media authority. You cannot fake your way through it.
You need to build your websites authentically. If you accomplish these goals,