Google SEO 101 For Google
This article is part three of a four part series on optimizing
your website for the the three major search engines. Part
one, titled "Google SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your
website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled "Google
SEO For Yahoo!" covered optimizing your website to rank on
Yahoo!. In this article we will cover optimizing your website
for Google.
I likely don't even need to mention that Google is currently
the largest of all the search engines with ComScore Media
estimating this giant to be responsible for 42.7% of all
online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people
tend to view Google as the engine to rank on. While this
point is debatable (let's remember that there's still 57.3% of
searches that aren't done on Google) it's definitely an
important engine to rank on. So how is it done?
The Factors
To optimize and rank highly on Google, as with any of the
major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On
Google the most important of these factors are:
• Backlinks
• Age
• Content
• How it fares in the results
Backlinks
More than on either Yahoo! or MSN backlinks are key to
attaining top rankings on Google. More importantly,
Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is
very different than either of the other two engines. Once
upon a time backlink acquisition was mainly a numbers
game. If you had more links you had higher rankings, it was
basically as simple as that. Today however Google has an
algorithm inside their algorithm for determining which links
are more valuable than others. This algorithm has a
number of factors itself, however there are some that are
more important than others. They key factors that determine
the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the
ranking of your site are:
• The age of the links - Like domains, links gain weight
with age. The longer your links have been on a web page
the higher their value. Basically this means that your link
building efforts today aren't going to pay off for a number of
months. The weight seems to age gradually. In a month
your link will hold partial weight, in two months it'll hold a bit
more and so on. Links hold the majority of their weight after
about 5 to 6 months.
• The location of the link - The physical location of your
link on the page is an indicator to Google of its value. A link
buried in the footer of a page will hold virtually no weight
whereas a link near the top (i.e. where a visitor is likely to
see it) will hold much more. Another location factor is how
this link is situated relative to the content around it. A link
that is located within content holds more weight than a link
in a typical link-page or directory format with a title and
description. The inline nature of the aforementioned
location indicates that the link itself is more natural.
• The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used
is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as
"SEO firms" then using these two keywords in the anchor
text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these
keywords. Be careful though, building a thousand links
using all the same anchor text is going to look suspicious.
Vary your anchor text, perhaps include other keywords and
you'll find your efforts rewarded. The formatting of the link is
also relevant. A link that uses bold, italics, etc. is obviously
meant to be seen by a visitor and is thus more highly
regarded by Google.
• Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of
key importance. Getting a link on a health site if you're an
SEO firm is going to hold little weight whereas a link from
an SEO resource site will be much more valuable.
• PageRank - While the value of PageRank is arguably
dropping when one is considering it's importance in link
building it is still a factor. A link from a PageRank 5 page is
worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 2
page.
Age
In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO
firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an
important factor. Google has since become a domain name
registrar which gives them access to whois data and thus
they can clearly see the age of a domain, who it is
registered to, where it is hosted, etc. The older your domain
is the more legitimate Google sees it and thus the more
likely they are to rank it. Additionally, domains that are
registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more
legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.
Content
Google is pickier than either Yahoo! or MSN when it comes
to content. While the phrase, "content is king," may be
overused it is still relevant. The more content you have on
your site the more likely someone is to find what they're
looking for when they get there. Thus, the more content you
have on your site the more likely Google is to believe a
searcher will find what they're looking for there. This does
not mean that you should grab every bit of content you can
find and build a 500,000 page site about potatoes. The
content needs to be relevant and preferably well written.
While a search engine spider may not be able to tell if your
content is truly well written it must appeal to a human visitor.
The reason for this will be made clearer below.
A blog is a good option for the easy addition of relevant
content provided that you can dedicate the time (generally
only a few minutes per day) to post some new and
interesting information on your industry.
Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on
Yahoo! or MSN however it is a factor and in the SEO "game"
any factor that holds weight needs to be taken into
consideration in all but the least competitive areas. While a
site targeting a phrase such as "bed and breakfast in the
middle of nowhere" can afford weakness in some of the
areas most of us cannot. As noted in the articles on MSN
and Yahoo! it would be unwise for me to specify an optimal
keyword density here as the optimal levels vary by site type,
topic, and fluctuate with the algorithm updates. Keyword
densities need to be reanalyzed approximately monthly or
any time an update is noted.
How it fares in the results
How your website fares in the results is a growing factor
and will only continue to gain importance as time passes. If
your website appears in the results for a specific phrase yet
no one click on is your website will drop out of the rankings.
Arguably worse, if your website is clicked however after a
few seconds Google detects that the searcher has returned
to the results to find a new site your site will drop. It is for
this reason that it is important to insure that the titles you
write for your website are both search engine and human
friendly. You want Google to rank it highly and you also need
humans to click it or Google won't rank it highly (circular
logic I know but valid nonetheless).
You also need to make sure that what people see when
they first land on your page either is the information they are
looking for or alternatively, clearly indicates where that
information can be found. This point may seem obvious
simply from a usability standpoint however the number of
sites out there that violate this basic principle is vast. As part
of your SEO efforts you will want to take a look at your site
from a user's standpoint or better yet, watch real users
navigate it to see if they can find what they're looking for
quickly. You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention
so make sure that your visitor can find what they want in that
time. You may need to hire experienced web designers to
bring your website up to speed however the cost of this is
lower than the cost of losing rankings and business due to
poor design and the falling rankings that will follow.
Conclusion
Google has the most sophisticated algorithm of the three
major engines and must be treated as such. Tricks rarely
work and when they do they tend to work only for a short
period of time. Build a strong site with lots of quality content
that is easily navigated and will appeal to your human
visitors and you're off to a good start. Optimize your keyword
densities and secure quality links to your site and while it
may take a bit of time to get past the aging delays, you will
succeed on Google.
This article is part three of a four part series on optimizing
your website for the the three major search engines. Part
one, titled "Google SEO For MSN" covered optimizing your
website to rank highly on MSN, while part two, titled "Google
SEO For Yahoo!" covered optimizing your website to rank on
Yahoo!. In this article we will cover optimizing your website
for Google.
I likely don't even need to mention that Google is currently
the largest of all the search engines with ComScore Media
estimating this giant to be responsible for 42.7% of all
online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people
tend to view Google as the engine to rank on. While this
point is debatable (let's remember that there's still 57.3% of
searches that aren't done on Google) it's definitely an
important engine to rank on. So how is it done?
The Factors
To optimize and rank highly on Google, as with any of the
major engines, specific areas need to be addressed. On
Google the most important of these factors are:
• Backlinks
• Age
• Content
• How it fares in the results
Backlinks
More than on either Yahoo! or MSN backlinks are key to
attaining top rankings on Google. More importantly,
Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is
very different than either of the other two engines. Once
upon a time backlink acquisition was mainly a numbers
game. If you had more links you had higher rankings, it was
basically as simple as that. Today however Google has an
algorithm inside their algorithm for determining which links
are more valuable than others. This algorithm has a
number of factors itself, however there are some that are
more important than others. They key factors that determine
the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the
ranking of your site are:
• The age of the links - Like domains, links gain weight
with age. The longer your links have been on a web page
the higher their value. Basically this means that your link
building efforts today aren't going to pay off for a number of
months. The weight seems to age gradually. In a month
your link will hold partial weight, in two months it'll hold a bit
more and so on. Links hold the majority of their weight after
about 5 to 6 months.
• The location of the link - The physical location of your
link on the page is an indicator to Google of its value. A link
buried in the footer of a page will hold virtually no weight
whereas a link near the top (i.e. where a visitor is likely to
see it) will hold much more. Another location factor is how
this link is situated relative to the content around it. A link
that is located within content holds more weight than a link
in a typical link-page or directory format with a title and
description. The inline nature of the aforementioned
location indicates that the link itself is more natural.
• The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used
is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as
"SEO firms" then using these two keywords in the anchor
text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these
keywords. Be careful though, building a thousand links
using all the same anchor text is going to look suspicious.
Vary your anchor text, perhaps include other keywords and
you'll find your efforts rewarded. The formatting of the link is
also relevant. A link that uses bold, italics, etc. is obviously
meant to be seen by a visitor and is thus more highly
regarded by Google.
• Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of
key importance. Getting a link on a health site if you're an
SEO firm is going to hold little weight whereas a link from
an SEO resource site will be much more valuable.
• PageRank - While the value of PageRank is arguably
dropping when one is considering it's importance in link
building it is still a factor. A link from a PageRank 5 page is
worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 2
page.
Age
In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO
firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an
important factor. Google has since become a domain name
registrar which gives them access to whois data and thus
they can clearly see the age of a domain, who it is
registered to, where it is hosted, etc. The older your domain
is the more legitimate Google sees it and thus the more
likely they are to rank it. Additionally, domains that are
registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more
legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.
Content
Google is pickier than either Yahoo! or MSN when it comes
to content. While the phrase, "content is king," may be
overused it is still relevant. The more content you have on
your site the more likely someone is to find what they're
looking for when they get there. Thus, the more content you
have on your site the more likely Google is to believe a
searcher will find what they're looking for there. This does
not mean that you should grab every bit of content you can
find and build a 500,000 page site about potatoes. The
content needs to be relevant and preferably well written.
While a search engine spider may not be able to tell if your
content is truly well written it must appeal to a human visitor.
The reason for this will be made clearer below.
A blog is a good option for the easy addition of relevant
content provided that you can dedicate the time (generally
only a few minutes per day) to post some new and
interesting information on your industry.
Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on
Yahoo! or MSN however it is a factor and in the SEO "game"
any factor that holds weight needs to be taken into
consideration in all but the least competitive areas. While a
site targeting a phrase such as "bed and breakfast in the
middle of nowhere" can afford weakness in some of the
areas most of us cannot. As noted in the articles on MSN
and Yahoo! it would be unwise for me to specify an optimal
keyword density here as the optimal levels vary by site type,
topic, and fluctuate with the algorithm updates. Keyword
densities need to be reanalyzed approximately monthly or
any time an update is noted.
How it fares in the results
How your website fares in the results is a growing factor
and will only continue to gain importance as time passes. If
your website appears in the results for a specific phrase yet
no one click on is your website will drop out of the rankings.
Arguably worse, if your website is clicked however after a
few seconds Google detects that the searcher has returned
to the results to find a new site your site will drop. It is for
this reason that it is important to insure that the titles you
write for your website are both search engine and human
friendly. You want Google to rank it highly and you also need
humans to click it or Google won't rank it highly (circular
logic I know but valid nonetheless).
You also need to make sure that what people see when
they first land on your page either is the information they are
looking for or alternatively, clearly indicates where that
information can be found. This point may seem obvious
simply from a usability standpoint however the number of
sites out there that violate this basic principle is vast. As part
of your SEO efforts you will want to take a look at your site
from a user's standpoint or better yet, watch real users
navigate it to see if they can find what they're looking for
quickly. You have about 3 seconds to get a visitor's attention
so make sure that your visitor can find what they want in that
time. You may need to hire experienced web designers to
bring your website up to speed however the cost of this is
lower than the cost of losing rankings and business due to
poor design and the falling rankings that will follow.
Conclusion
Google has the most sophisticated algorithm of the three
major engines and must be treated as such. Tricks rarely
work and when they do they tend to work only for a short
period of time. Build a strong site with lots of quality content
that is easily navigated and will appeal to your human
visitors and you're off to a good start. Optimize your keyword
densities and secure quality links to your site and while it
may take a bit of time to get past the aging delays, you will
succeed on Google.
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