Craig Cochrane shares his insights into SEO best practice as a key part of Web Tonic’s web marketing services.
There are plenty of operators out there who claim to offer better search engine rankings for your website. They fill your inbox, phone your office and bombard you with technical babble about how they can drive more visitors to your website and get your pages ranking number one with Google. Whilst not all SEO marketers are peddling fancy tricks and over-priced packages, too many of them are using methods designed to ‘cheat’ the algorithm.
That’s the Google algorithm, by the way – the one that mathematically decides where each page on the internet ranks in search results based on what people are looking for online.
This doesn’t mean search engine optimisation is bad. In fact, SEO is an important part of your website development which, if done correctly, will improve your site’s performance in converting visitors to enquiries.
Don’t let the fear of Google stop you from using good search engine optimisation
The reason Google is the best at what they do is clear: Google dedicates massive amounts of time and money to retaining a high level of customer experience. To protect this all important market advantage, Google rewards sites that meet its standards in SEO practice and penalise those that try to cheat it.
If you think about it, anyone who believes they can pit their skills against the substantial resources of the number one search engine in the world is not only mistaken, they are completely insane!
The Google algorithm implements at least 200 ranking factors using a mathematical string formula that is probably a week long, but the goal is simple: give the customer the best results possible for their search enquiries.
Good search engine optimisation is equally simple: it is all about optimising the ability for the right people to find the pages on your website. This means working with instead of against Google to reach your target market more effectively.
It makes sense if you break SEO down logically:
What Google wants to do is to put good web pages in front of people looking for the content on those pages.
What you want to do is get people who are specifically looking for what you are marketing to find you through Google searches.
If a web page uses the types of search terms used by people looking for the information, products or services that are marketed on that page, and uses them in a way that is easy for Google to find them, then they will be included somewhere in the search results.
The better the match with the search results (using those 200 or so factors we mentioned earlier) the higher up the search rankings a page will go.
In other words, if the site content is relevant because it is written with your target market in mind, and if it is placed in all the right places so that Google’s search engine algorithm can identify it, then the right people are more likely to find it.
Now here is where it gets really interesting. If the right people are defined as those who are more likely to be looking for your products or services, then it makes sense that they will spend a greater amount of time reading the information and will click through to other pages.
This is called engagement, and it is measurable.
When it happens, Google will say: this page is obviously interesting to these people – let’s put it in front of more people who are using the same key phrases they used to get to your site. As a result, the page moves up the rankings for those searches.
The right content, aimed at the right people in the right way equals reward.
So what is bad SEO?
Google protects the customer experience with a passion. Anything that looks mass-purchased or computer-generated or simply doesn’t appear natural to the search engines can set off alarm bells. Text that is crammed full of keywords and anchor links, a disproportionate number or sudden appearance of multiple inbound links, hidden text and other ‘black hat’ SEO practices are a no-no.
Google is actively looking for and filtering out the cheats and tricks!
Getting someone to manipulate search results to achieve a false page ranking above its natural position puts you at risk of having a web page penalised for breaching Google’s webmaster guidelines. It works against you in a much more fundamental way too. Any false boost in results is unsustainable because the percentage of visitors from your target market is more likely to go down instead of up, weakening your site’s overall performance.
A good SEO strategy works with sincerity in reaching the right people in the right way. After all, like any marketing content, the more relevant the message is to your target market, the more likely they are to respond to it.
Ultimately, if you play by Google’s rules, which are aimed at giving people quality results for what they are searching for, you will be rewarded with more new customers finding you when they need you.