I wish I knew how Google works. When it comes to delivering our site to our intended customers, knowing how Google works would be worth a million or should I say billion no actually kasillion (if there is such a number) dollars. The sad truth is that nobody knows exactly how Google works or the complicated search algorithm, except the very clever and highly paid programming boffin’s that work there, and I bet they only know the part they are working on and not whole picture.
We can get a pretty good idea from understanding that Google is a business and very successful one. Just like any good business they are striving to be the best and give the best customer experiance.
How Google Works | How Search Engines Work
To understand how Google works and how search engines work in general we need to understand what makes a good search engine?
A good search engine will give their customer (the person entering words into the search box) the results they are looking for.
Google wants to give you the relevant answer you were looking for, first time. What it doesn’t want you to do is search again or click in and out of websites because you can’t find what you are looking for. Why not ? that’s just not how Google works because if you can’t find what you are looking for quickly, then there is a good chance you will try a different search engine and if enough people start using a different search engine then google won’t be the best and most popular search engine any more, people would be “binging it” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “google it” does it!
This was proven when google’s biggest competitor”youtube” started to become a close competition to google, so what did google do? Got out its massive cheque book and brought it. Now if they could just do that to Facebook then they really would be dominating the world.
How Google Works | How Bing Works
So we know that google (Or any other search engine) want’s to give the most relevant results for the word or words entered into the search box, these words are called keywords (I assume the keys that unlock the page you are looking for). So it lists out what it thinks are the most related pages in order, the most related being at the top. There is also results at the top in a box and results down the side but these are paid adverts, companies pay google to have their website pages listed there.
For now we will just concentrate on the results in the middle of the page, these are known as organic results. How Google works and how bing works is by arranging these into order of the most relevant at the top.
First thing we must remember is that search engines rank a page within a site not a whole site. People say “My site is on the first page of google” its not! A page from within their site maybe on the first page of Google and its possible to have every page within your site on the first page of Google for different keyword, but remember it the page we are looking to rank.
How Google Works | What is Google Looking For?
Google looks for a number of different things when deciding where to index your page in the rankings.
The main things are, in no particular order. 1. Quality of content. 2. On page keyword placement. 3. Other sites linking (voting) to your page. 4.Domain name
How Google work with quality.Your Page within your site that you want to rank should be of good quality and give the person that visits your site what they are looking for. This is often overlooked, people just want to through a site together and hope to rank highly for it. Its just doesn’t work like that. Remember how Google works, it (he or she, I think Google is a she, though Google sounds more like boys name. Geek alert! ) doesn’t want the searcher jumping in and out of pages because then they are not finding what they are looking for. Not a good customer experience, Google is not doing its job .
How Google works with keyword placement. Known as on page search engine optimization or on page SEO is probably one of the easiest components of lining your page up with how Google works. On page SEO is a case of keeping to a few guild lines when designing your content and layout. This is one of the most overlooked areas of SEO. You only need to fire up a free seo tool and analyse the top ten spots for just about any keyword to see that most pages haven’t even got that part right. How Google works with on page seo is its looking for 4 main things Keyword density (to know the keyword your trying to rank for) title tags, description tags and H1 tags.
How Google works with off page SEO. This is probably the strongest factor when it comes to how Google works with ranking your page within the search engines. Google needs to see other sites pointing to it using the keywords as anchor text ( if you click the words anchor text that will take you to a description on anchor text, that is anchor text in action. Why does other sites need to point at our page using anchor text then? to prove to Google that the site is who it says it is, that’s why I refer to the links as votes earlier. Other sites are voting for your page and the anchor text is telling Google that the page is relevant to the keyword.
How Google works with domain names. Domain names are important, first if contains the keyword you are trying to rank for and second the age of the domain name can play an important part.
That is my opinion of how Google works, how bing works and how search engines work.
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