Search engine optimization is the art of getting your website to the top of Google, and that means that it will rank on Bing and Yahoo also. Why do you want to be on the top of Google? Simple. Perhaps 50% of the people searching on Google for something – anything – click on one of the first three websites in the listings.
40% click on websites further down. Only 10% of people ever go on to page 2. So, if you are not on the first page of Google you haven’t got much of a chance. And if you’re buried on page 7 – well, you get the idea. These statistics are just rough estimates; Google knows, but they aren’t talking. But everyone knows that the first page of Google is “where it’s at.”
Going back ten years, it was fairly simple to get on the first page of Google. You just plastered your keyword all over your page. So if you were selling, say, jam doughnuts, you had the words “jam doughnuts” all over the page. In capitals, in bold, underlined, in italics – any way you could think of and as many times as possible.
The result was (and you may remember this) people had pages with “jam doughnuts” everywhere and the actual content of the page made no sense whatever.
Google’s Spiders Were Rather Young
Still that didn’t bother Google’s spiders. They were rather young in those days and they would see a page and think to themselves “Ooooohh look. This page is all about jam doughnuts. Lots of jam doughnuts. We’d better put it at the top of page one!”
However, after a while, even Google realized that this was getting pretty stupid, and they sent their spiders to algorithm school. The spiders passed their 5th grade exams. And search engine optimization changed radically. Not to put too fine a point on it, Google now wanted your page to make sense!
But of course, in the ensuing time things have changed even more radically, making search engine optimization even harder. This is not helped by the fact that Google don’t actually tell you what they want to see in order to rank your website at the top, where you want it.
And this is why people who want their website to rank on Google – which is just about everybody – come to people like me who speak Google and do understand what it is that Google want to see – even though it takes years of expertise to spot the trends, because Google makes things ever harder by constantly changing its’ requirements. Again, without telling anybody.
So what worked last week may very well not work this week, which is why I have to constantly keep my eyes and ears peeled so that I can spot what Google is doing.
If you want your website at the top of Google, then I’m your man. I am a recognized SEO expert here in San Francisco and throughout the Bay Area.
