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Imagine for a minute
that you're a librarian.

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But not a normal one.

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You're a librarian for
every book in the world.

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People depend on you every day
to find the exact book they need.

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How do you do it?

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You need a system.

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You need to know what's inside every
book and how books relate to each other.

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Your system needs to take in a lot
of information and spit out the best

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answers for a patron's questions.

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It's not an easy job.

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Search engines like Google and Bing
are the librarians of the internet.

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Their systems collect information
about every page on the web,

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so they can help people find
exactly what they're looking for.

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And every search engine has a
secret recipe, called an algorithm,

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for turning all that information
into useful search results.

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Now, if you own a website,
search results matter.

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When your pages have higher rankings,
they help more people find you.

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The key to higher rankings is making
sure your website has the ingredients

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search engines need for their recipes.

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This is called search
engine optimization, or SEO.

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As it turns out, most of the
big ingredients are known.

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Let's take a look.

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First, words matter.

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Search engines account
for every word on the web.

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This way, when someone searches
for shoe repair, the search engines

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can narrow the results to only the
pages that are about those words.

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Second, titles matter.

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Each page on the web has an official
title, but you may not ever see

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it because it's in the code.

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Search engines pay a lot of attention
to page titles because they often

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summarize the page like a book's title.

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Third, links between websites matter.

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When one web page links to another,
it's usually a recommendation, telling

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readers this site has good information.

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A web page with a lot of links coming
to it can look good to search engines.

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But some people try to fool the
search engines by creating or

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buying bogus links all over the web
that point to their own website.

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Usually, search engines can detect when a
site has a lot of them, and they account

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for it by giving links from trustworthy
sites more weight in the recipe.

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Fourth, the words that are
used in links matter too.

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If your web page says, Amazon has lots
of books, and the word books is linked,

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search engines can establish that Amazon.

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com is related to the word books.

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This way, when someone searches for
books, that site will rank well.

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Lastly, search engines
care about reputation.

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Sites with a consistent record of fresh,
engaging content and growing numbers of

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quality links may be considered rising
stars and do well in search rankings.

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These are just the basics, and the recipes
are refined and changed all the time.

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Good SEO is about making sure your
website has great content that's

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supported by the ingredients that
search engines need for their recipes.

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I'm Lela Fever, and this has
been Search Engine Optimization,

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explained by Common Craft.

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Learn more about SEO
at Search Engine Land.