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What Google Wants

Written by: Jennifer Horowitz

Article Overview: There are so many articles out there on SEO and so many conflicting opinions. Some of those opinions are people just spouting off without any solid evidence to back it up and others are based on tests and experiments done by the author. It can be really confusing for someone trying to understand SEO. Who is right, who is wrong? Where should you focus your attention? Let’s answer that question by breaking things down…

What Google Wants

There are so many articles out there on SEO and so many conflicting opinions. Some of those opinions are people just spouting off without any solid evidence to back it up and others are based on tests and experiments done by the author. It can be really confusing for someone trying to understand SEO. Who is right, who is wrong? Where should you focus your attention? Let’s answer that question by breaking things down…

The truth is…with over 200 components in Google’s algorithm there is definitely more than one way to get your site ranked.

If you’ve read any of my previous articles you may have come across my Gold Star analogy. Let me quickly break it down for you…

Think of the engines like teachers handing out gold stars. Google currently has about 200 factors in their algorithms that determine how your site will rank. Imagine your teacher with a clipboard and checklist with 200 items on it and she assigns you gold stars for each of the things you do well.

The catch is that some of the items on the list are more important and you may get multiple gold stars for that one item, whereas other items are worth only one gold star.

No one (but Google) knows for sure how the algorithm works, so we study and we test and we monitor the industry to come up with a technique that works well for getting sites ranked based on earning gold stars in various different areas.

The number of gold stars you achieve will determine how well your site will rank.

Let’s say you have a ton of great content that uses your keywords really well, and you also have some other on-page optimization in place (like naming images with keywords, clean code that is free of ‘bloat’ etc.) but you don’t have many links. You could still rank well, we see it all the time. Then let’s say another site has very little content but they have an obscene amount of legitimate links, they could also rank well (and often do). And now we have the whole content versus links debate and both sides have proven their case. So what do you do?

I encourage you to continue to look at the facts and then come up with an answer that makes sense to you.

Ultimately Google’s goal is to deliver the most relevant results to the searchers using Google. So if you break it down in the simplest terms what you need to do is prove to Google that your site is relevant to the phrases you want to be ranked for.

Simple, right? The truth is the concept is simple and once you understand that, you can go about the work of achieving your goal.

Now that you understand at the simplest level what needs to be done, you can start looking at the sites that already rank well for your keywords and try to figure out how many gold stars they have (what are they doing right). This process is called reverse engineering.

Next you start on your journey to beat them out. If they have a nice amount of content, you need to get your own “nice amount” of content – and then exceed it. If they have some good links you need to start getting some good links – and then continue on to get great links etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it’s all quick and easy and going to happen over night. But what I am saying is rather than get caught up in the all talk about this strategy and that strategy, if you simply focus on creating a great site that has a lot of relevant content that people will want to link to… then you are on the right path. You can spend your time building and improving your site, or you can spend your time chasing the latest technique that people are debating about.

And I can’t resist chiming in on the content versus links debate…

My response is: why choose only one? If we know both are important to the engines why not focus on both and build your site in both areas? That makes a whole lot more sense to me!

This has been an overly simplified way of looking at things, but I think it is important to take a step back and remind yourself what Google’s objective is and then focus your attention and spend your time on the simple things and not chasing the latest technique to “game” Google.

Related Articles
  Google Primer: 10 things you need to know (Part 1)
  Google Profiles
  SEO - How Important is Your Google Page Rank?
  Does a Domain Name Help with Higher Rankings?
  Google AdWords - 4 Factors That Determine How Much Money You Make (Or Lose)

Article Tags: algorithm, algorithms, analogy, bloat, breaking things, clipboard, gold star, gold stars, google, images, page optimization, seo, truth



Related Forum Posts
How Do You Check Google Ranking? - Now that Google is so responsive to your own search history, how can you get a good idea of what your Google ranking really is for your web pages? Whenever I check my ranking for specific keywords on Google, my web pages appear on the front page, or suspiciously high. My way around this is to check Google ranking via other computer Internet links, i.e., whenever I'm working in a library I will use a library computer to check. I check Google ranking before logging into my Gmail or other Google-related accounts. Does anybody else have any other tips for discovering your Google ranking? Nowadays, I check Bing.com for my webpage ranking as it gives a much less favourable (and so, I guess, "truer") ranking for my webpages than Google does...
Re: Cool Video - How Google Updates it's Search Algorithm - Great Video Evan! As per the recent Google Algorithm update. Google also give more value to content and even shows rich snippet in Google SERP's.
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - HI Evan, Look forward to hearing more. I like the point that you brought out with "testing." Google has some amazing tools that can help website owners track everything. From Google Adsense reporting to Google Analytic to Google Conversion and most recently Google Goal Tracking. Between all of those tools a website owner should know exactly what type of traffic is converting & making them money and what type of traffic is not. I even use Google PPC to estimate organic search engine traffic! Website owners would do well to follow your lead and create a base, and then test off that base in regards to advertising. Jeff
Re: Readers, Money or SEO? Which comes first? - Hi Chris, I like your passion on the subject; I would have to agree with you on this one. Our company is finding Google is starting to look at content more. Links & Link Value are far more important....but Google is giving link value to sites that have quality content. I read a leaked report from Google a while back that explained how Google manually reviews sites. They have 1,000's of outsourced employees that go through sites one by one and rank them on many different levels. Once a site like Mashable is ranked a certain way, that value sticks with them. That is why no matter what Mashable, techcrunch, Amazon, etc... put out they rank well for. Obviously they all have incredible links but Google has given them link value based on who they are. Obviously the idea of quality content is nothing new, just seems like it has gotten lost in the SEO world. Jeff
Re: Domain name sugestion - On the dashes question, I just did a test on my own site, Grasp-The-Nettle.com and found I got the following results: grasp the nettle = 6th on page 1 of Google graspthenettle = 5th on page 1 of Google grasp-the-nettle = 6th on page 1 of Google It doesn't seem to make much difference.


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