Search engines...
What does Google want?
By Jon Fletcher - Managing Director
The holy grail of search engine marketing is a method to ensure a top spot on Google for competitive phrases. While we certainly haven’t found this particular grail, we can offer advice to steer you on the right path and avoid the many false leads.
Rather than trying to backwards engineer the way Google works, we
have found it a far more effective approach to look at Google’s motivations (without wishing to sound like a method actor).
The process goes something like this:
Google is not a public service organisation, despite its free and massively useful service; it is a profit making company that has to act in the interests of its shareholders. Basically it needs to make money.
How does Google make money? Primarily through advertising
How does it attract advertisers? By generating very large numbers of visitors/searchers
How does it get the visitors? By being the best search engine
How did it get to be and how does it remain the best search engine? By ensuring the "best" sites rise to the top of its rankings
How can it ensure that this happens?
This is where you come in…
Google can only see on your page what you put there and even then to Google your page is just a combination of words. In order to categorise your pages it will make an assessment of your site based on the relevance of your text compared to what someone is searching for and the importance of that text. If the searcher is looking for "BBQ recipes" then a page specifically mentioning BBQ recipes, in the title, in the text a number of times and so on would do better than one not doing so. A certain number of occurrences of the phrase is optimal and links coming to the page using the phrase help considerably. Already however, you can see that this could fast descend into an exercise of counting keywords and links and that is not a productive line to follow.
As Google is attempting to feature the "best" sites at the top you need to consider what makes for a good site in Google’s algorithmic mind. It all boils down to information, that’s what Google is indexing, relevant authoritative information. It can determine what the information is about and can measure the number of other web pages that recommend that information by linking to it.
This leads to a set of simple techniques to ensure that Google gets what it needs from your site. In the above example, a site focusing on BBQ recipes should:
have plenty of them (content)
natural language (content)
What you end up with is a web site that contains a wealth of easily identifiable information that Google can navigate and categorise. The real payoff comes as the site is every bit as easy to navigate for the human visitor and contains a wealth of information. Any time that others would spend counting keywords, manufacturing links and agonising over arcane search engine optimisation practices you should spend building good, relevant, unique content.
This particular example is from some work we did for a client back in 2001 creating the site Barbecue Online (due to close December 2008) and later for the same client the replacement site BBQ.co.uk (adopting all content from Barbecue Online).
Take a look at the sites and their Google position (just look for "BBQ recipes" or "BBQ" on Google) and you will see that all we did was to create the best BBQ recipe library that our client’s budget allowed with plenty of information easily followed by Google and the many hundreds of thousands of subsequent visitors (despite the British weather).
What Google does not want
Google doesn’t want anything that stops it doing its job of indexing the online world. Examples include:
On a final note, there is no need to attempt to create your complete web site in one go, in fact there are advantages to planning a staged build over a number of years. With your online marketing spend spread over a more cash-flow-friendly period, Google will see that you have an active web site with regular new additions. You can also react more effectively to the results of your web site performance analysis.
For further information about what Google wants take a look at their advice for web masters:
Can we help?
