DOMINATE YOUR COMPETITION WITH OUR EXPERT SEO SUNSHINE COAST AND SEO BRISBANE AGENCIES

One of the key SEO concepts that we espouse at Search Domination is to really try to help search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing classify our website as valuable.  We want search engines to be able to see our website and understand what our web pages are about.  There are a range of tools and techniques that allow us to do that but to be effective we firstly need to learn a bit about search engines so we can assist them in learning about us.

Search engines already believe they understand value.  Take Google for example.  Google has created a paradigm, called its algorithm, where it has identified certain characteristics that it believes makes a website valuable.  If we know what characteristics Google has identified as valuable we can create websites, web pages and content that fits their algorithm and become ‘valuable’ in Google’s eyes.  When our website is seen to be valuable for certain keyword phrases our website will rank high on search results.

To understand this let’s break it down further and let’s treat Google as if it was a person.  A person will see value in things they understand.  For example, if I choose a book on Web Design and it’s written in English I will find worth in it because I know I will be able to read it.  However, if I pick up a book about Digital Marketing and it’s not written in English it would be worthless to me.

A person, just like Google, would also value the following:

• Something that is reliable, unambiguous and honest (for example, a useful and relevant website)
• Something that is uncommon or dissimilar (for example, a brand)
• Something that is being noticed (for example, a viral celebrity post), and
• Things that are real and genuine (for example, a real diamond)

The three tools that Google utilises to understand what is happening on the internet include:

1. Googlebot: a piece of software that searches the internet and crawls different web pages and picks up information to send back to a central database.
2. Traffic data – Google is aware of where people are moving around the internet. It obtains this information from its search engine results page(SERP). The SERP is the page you are provided with after you have typed in a keyword phrase into the search site. When a user clicks on a listing in the SERP Google will track that and knows who is clicking on certain pages along with the action they are taking when they get there.
3. User activity on web pages – Google is aware of the action that is taken by a user on a given web page, whether its clicking on a button, pressing play on a video or surfing through product descriptions. Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are used to capture these user actions. This data is provided to both Google and to website owners to allow for appropriate analysis. It allows a website owner to understand what is happening on their website as well.

Google Bot goes out and crawls the internet. It reads web pages and it acknowledges and follows internal and external links going to and from a web page. Information that is found is sent back to Google to be cached in a colossal database. Most importantly the bot captures information from a web page that a user can not see. Things like title tags, description meta tags, keywords meta tags, image ALT text and pieces of code that serve the respective web page up.

So in short Google bot will crawl a web site looking for key elements to run its algorithm, and once found it will grab the information, evaluate it, and store it on a database.

Google is simply trying to learn what is on the internet for every given keyword phrase and through an evaluation of sorts it wants to place the most valued websites for the given keyword phrase at the top of its search results.

As a website owner, we want to provide Google with very specific information so that Google sees our website valuable enough to pay attention to. That’s what Google does, it searches the internet to find what we, as humans, find valuable on the internet.

It has already established a paradigm that highlights the characteristics of a website that makes it valuable.

In September 2013, Google implemented its new search platform called ‘Hummingbird’.

The name originates from being ‘exact’ and ‘quick’ and is intended to concentrate more on the connotation behind the search terms. Hummingbird is giving more consideration to each word in a search, guaranteeing that the entire search phrase – the entire sentence or dialogue or denotation – is taken into calculation, instead of specific words.  The objective is that pages corresponding to the meaning are more successful, instead of pages complementing just a couple of words.

Google Hummingbird isn’t an update that is penalty focused.  It is evident that Google Hummingbird is attempting to understand the entire search term instead of its individual words.

So what does Hummingbird mean for your SEO?  It means the content on your site is critical.  Your content needs to be relevant, explanatory and rich.  You want to ensure that your website content ties in with the intent of your targeted keyword phrases better than your competition’s content.

When internet users are typing in search phrases associated with you targeted keywords you need to consider whether the search phrase used is going to be informational ‘Who is?’, navigational ‘How do I?’ or transactional ‘How much?’.  You then need to ensure that your site’s content encompasses each of the various types of conversational search queries used.