- What is Google looking for when indexing/ranking your Web site?
- Why is site X ranking number one while my site ranks on the 5th page?
- Site X is not even a good site, so, why does Google think it’s better than mine?
- Is it even possible to rank my site above site X?
Google SEO is not magic. Google doesn’t favor any site over the others without clear and measurable calculations. But what are these calculations?
Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-spam and SEO spokesman, has said numerious times that googlebots (Google Spiders) look for over 200 criterium to identify which site should be above the others. In other words, there is a clear formula in these mega software that scores each Web page for these factors and gives it a number. This secret number sometimes correlates with Page Rank (a number from 0-10 given to each Web page by Google).
The list of what Google looks for on your Web page is secret, but I have narrowed down the most important factors to: 1) content and 2) inbound links.
Google’s job is to show search results for any keywords you look for. It is true that Google looks at your Web page as a whole, but in reality it’s only interested in the content of your site (text, videos, images). As long as the back-end code is not interfering with its spiders to crawl your site, then everythign else except the text becomes irrelevant (one exception is the title tag –which is in the code; the other is the description meta tag).
Then we should ask “what should I do so Google likes my content”?
The simplified answer is “having lots of original, relevant, fresh content without any grammatical mistakes”. This will in turn help your efforts to attract inbound links.
Original Content
What is the most important factor is to have “original” content. When it comes to Google, content that is copied from other sites is a big no-no. I have seen many sites get “flagged” and de-indexed by Google for simply having duplicate content. On the other hand, even if you have original content, search for it on Google to find possible sites that have copied your content. Sometimes Google makes the mistake of degrading an original content because others have copied it.
If you cannot keep up with those that tend to copy your text, you can solve this issue by re-writing your home-page content once a month. So you maintain having original content at all times.
Fresh Content
Blogs and news sites are good examples of sites that have fresh content on a regular basis. But if your site’s content remains the same, it is a good idea to re-write it at least once a month.
Updating the Site
What we’ve learnt in many years of optimizing sites for Google is that the more often a page is updated, the more Google would be interested to index it. This is one of the important factors in ranking your site on Google search results.
Keyword-Rich Content
Having your keywords mentioned within your content is also very important. If your site is about “selling shoes” make sure you mention “selling shoes” or synonym keywords within your content.
Clean Copy
If your site has gramatical or spelling mistakes it will negatively effect your site’s ranking. The best is to hire an editor to edit your site’s content. You can get this done rather very cheap (sometimes at $25/page).
What you should stay away however is repeating your keywords more than once. Google will quickly degrade your site if it feels you’re trying to trick it to place you higher on the search engine.
In the next part of this article, I’ll be focusing on inbound links as the other important factor in Google
SEO. Stay tuned.
