Terms to Understand
- Ranking: actual position in search result, per search term
- PageRank (PR): value that marks a page in your site (home page usually is highest).
- Keywords: words that define a page, not the META tag
- Page Title: text written inside the <title> tags
- On-page factors: elements on YOUR website (content, tags, links…etc)
- Off-page factors: elements in OTHER websites (links pointing to yours)
How Google Works
The Google search engine is like a bline person reading a book in Braille – anything that is graphical, spatial, or visual in nature is simply not seen.
So What Is a Ranking?
Two factors are what defines SERP (Search Engine Result Position):
- Page Relevancy:
how well a web page “matches” a specific word search (On-page factors). - Page Importance:
the Quality and Quantity of links that point to your web page from other websites
(Off-page factors).
Interesting numbers provided by a recent study:
First Page:
- 1st position 30%
- 2nd position 15%
- 3rd position 7%
- 4th position 5%
- 5th position 4%
- 6th position 4%
- 7th position 2%
- 8th position 2%
- 9th position 3%
- 10th position 5%
Second Page:
- 1st position 6%
- 2nd position 4%
- 3rd position 2%
- 4th position+ < 1%
- …
When Google Comes Visiting
Google visits your site using (robots) or (spiders). They start “reading” typically with your home page and then following each link to all other web pages on your site.
However, for spiders to “crawl your site”, you need to get another website to link to your website first!! These website crawls are performed by the main Google spider, called Googlebot.
Check your server log files for the user-agent “Googlebot”. This will tell you when Google crawls your site. You can also check by IP address.
Google Sandbox (aging factor)
- publish your website ASAP! Even before completion (Aging Delay: 6-24 months).
- Update content once a month at least
The Sandbox is a set of filters applied to new websites whereby the site cannot rank well (or at all) fpr any competitive keywords for 6-24 months. Start the aging clock!
How Google Ranks Pages
- On-Page Factors & Page Relevance:
Word(s) repetition on a page dictate the “theme” of a website. Links to your site in
other sites with the exact same keywords. - Off-Page Factors & Page Importance:
Page importance is all about links! Their quantity, quality, strength. Links from other
websites to yours are votes to its importance. Quality of the links is dependent on
the PageRank (PR) of the linking page. PageRank (PR) is assigned to your web page
after comparing every page in the Google index (billions and billions).
Top Things Google Looks For
- Keywords used in link text, on-site and especially off-site!
- Keywords in tags (H1, H2,…)
- Keywords in the Title tag
- PageRank (PR)
- Web pages containing at least 200 relevant words. The more pages on this site the better
- How often the content is updated.
- How fast you are obtaining new links (too fast is bad)
- How old the site is and How old links to a site are.