Companies, not just in San Francisco, but from throughout the world often call me and ask how they can get to the top of Google. Well, the first thing they have to understand is what is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is fancy-speak for getting a company to the top of Google.
However, there is a bit more to it than that. SEO involves organizing a company’s website so that it looks exactly the way that Google wants it to look. Now, this can be a problem, because Google don’t tell you exactly what they require so you have to work it out. Furthermore, from time to time they have updates and change their algorithms and they don’t tell you exactly what they have done about that either.
This is why your website can be on the top of Google today and vanish off the face of the earth – for all intents and purposes – the next. It is because what they want today is different from what they wanted yesterday. This is why you need an SEO expert like myself who can keep on top of things for you.
SEO Has Changed Out Of All Recognition
When you ask “what is SEO?” today, it has changed out of all recognition from a few years ago. Before the Penguin and Panda update back in 2014 Google’s spiders were pretty basic. Let’s say you had a business manufacturing hand sanitizer – although back then hand sanitizer was only really used in the health sector.
Google’s spiders would crawl your website and find the words “hand sanitizer” and the more times they found those words, the higher your website would rank. So what happened was that people covered their web pages with “hand sanitizer” all over the place. It wasn’t unusual to see a single page with the words “hand sanitizer” on it 20 or 30 times!
You may remember seeing things like this: “At Hander Sanitizer Inc., our hand sanitizer is the finest hand sanitizer that you can get and there is no hand sanitizer which is better”. Google’s spider would read that and think to itself “Doh! This is all about hand sanitizer” and promptly mark you up as a great website!
Even Google finally came to realize that sentences and web pages like that looked pretty stupid to real people. Some were almost unreadable.
Today, Google wants to see pages that read well, regular content posted, good images, videos, and so on, which inform and entertain real people and not just robots. So when you ask today “What is SEO?” it is about keeping your website up to date with great content and everything else which Google wants to see.
Since Google doesn’t tell you everything it wants to see, it is why you need an SEO expert like me who can fathom out what it will want next and ensure that your website is compliant. I have worked with many clients, not just in San Francisco, but throughout the United States.
