Hi, I’m John Allen with Marketing on the Web.
We assist companies in Huntsville, Alabama area with internet marketing services. Today, we’re going to talk about what is needed to rank in Google Search results.
There are really four things involved. First is content. If you can’t rank for something, if the words are not on your website, structure of the website, the way your site is put together, the architecture of the site plays into it, the links that point your website, this goes back to the original Larry Page, page rank algorithm that Google uses to determine the relevancy of your site to other sites. The fourth thing is freshness — how recently has anybody talked about website or how recently they posted about your website.
To go into to this a little further. It’s often said that content is king. Content, if we’re going to make an analogy to a racing car, would be the motor of the car. The more content you have, obviously, the better. The content needs to be focused. It needs to talk about a single subject. You don’t want a page talks about half a dozen different things. You really want to be focused on one item. If you want that page to rank for a specific topic.
The structure of the site — this is probably less understood but the way your site it structure communicates to Google the importance of the content within your site. By structuring your site, you can emphasize, or you can better emphasize words and phrases that are important to your market. Again, going back to the racing car analogy, this might be the chassis of the car. The wheels and the tires and the shock absorbers and how it all comes together to work on the track.
The third thing we’re talking about is links and that’s incoming links to the site. If you needed a roof for your house and you went to your neighbour and you said, “I need a roof. I noticed you got one recently, who did you use?” And the neighbour says “I used Joe. He did a great job. I’m very happy.” You’re probably going to file that away and think. Well, Joe’s a pretty good roofer and I’m going to use Joe when I get ready to do my roof. But later, you have a discussion with a builder and the builder says “Yeah, well, I’ve used Joe. He’s okay, but I used Bob. Bob is the best. I’ve been using Bob for 10 years and he is the best roofer in town.” Which are you going to consider the most relevant recommendation on the most important recommendation — your neighbour or the builder?
Google kind of does the same thing. They’re going to look at what is the site that has mentioned your site or that’s linking to your site. Is it some obscure blog or some forum or is it an authority or someone that they consider to be an authority referring back to your website about the topic that you’re talking about or about the business that you’re in. They obviously give more relevancy or ranking to that link from the good site or from the more authoritative site.
The last thing is freshness. Freshness is a pretty recent addition to the algorithm and what freshness refers to is how recently have you updated the site, how recently has someone talked about your content or talked about what is on your website. This could be a press release. This could a blog post, this can be a forum conversation, this can be Twitter conversations, this could be stuff on Facebook, but things that keep your website and conversations about your website, current in the media.
Let’s kind of wrap up what we’ve talked about here — content, structure, links, and freshness, being important to ranking. If you wanted your website to be on the first page of Google, if these things don’t come together, you’re not going to rank.
Again, I’m John Allen with Marketing on the Web and I hope we can help you out.
Come see us here: http://www.marketing-ontheweb.com/optimize/
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