The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

CHAPTER THREE

Search Fundamentals

Search has become a fundamental aspect of how we find information, identify solutions to problems, and accomplish an enormous range of tasks, from making purchases to booking travel. Without search engines—whether standalone like Google or platform-specific like LinkedIn Search—we would be unable to quickly find what we need and execute the tasks we seek to accomplish. We often don’t know where to find an answer or solution, or whether one exists; and even when we know where something is located, it can still be more efficient to use a search engine to retrieve it.

For instance, consider the URL https://blogs.example.com/archive/articles/2019/dogs/canine-dentistry-advice.html.

This web page may have information you’re looking for pertaining to canine dentistry. However, you likely have no idea that this blog exists, let alone where to find this specific page within the blog, given the complexity of the URL structure. Additionally, given its age (2019) it’s likely that this article will be archived, which means it won’t necessarily be on the blog’s home page—to find it you’d have to drill down at least three levels, and you might have to sift through dozens or hundreds of articles in the resulting list.

Conversely, consider the few keystrokes required to go to Google and perform a search for canine dentistry advice. Assuming that our example page is in Google’s index, and that Google considers it a relevant result for you when you perform the search, ...