Dan SteinerGoogle is like the godfather of the Internet. If it loves you, great things will follow. If you’re in Google’s doghouse however, you have an uphill battle proving to it that you don’t belong there. Google’s Internet Kingdom stems from it being the single most used search engine in the world, the search engine that other engines use, so to speak. Its algorithms have evolved over time to be very adept at finding useful things for its users, which feeds back into those users utilizing Google’s search function again and again. Google’s SEO is very picky about the things it considers good, and to help out webmasters, here’s a few things that your business can do to help make you one of Uncle Google’s favorite nephews or nieces.
Maintain High Quality Links
One of the major ranking metrics that Google utilizes is high quality links based on a site authority score. Links from high authority sites count a lot more than those from low authority sites. In fact, including low authority links interspersed in your content can lead to Google penalizing you for spreading bad links. Maintaining high link quality throughout your content makes you a high quality site in Google’s opinion, meaning that the search engine is more likely to throw results at you for your effort.
Relevant Content Keywords
While keyword density is no longer as powerful a metric as it used to be once upon a time, it is still important in helping Google determine what the content of a page is all about. Using hints from keyword density and outbound links, Google can create a general idea of the kind of user that would find this page useful. This is extremely important to Google as their algorithm now deals with delivering audience-based results as opposed to simply relevant search data to their users.
Good Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Meta data represents a good way for Google to determine the exact use of the page. It is a far better way to get Google to direct results to your pages than simply depending on relevant keywords. In combination they present a very potent way for getting targeted search traffic from Google that is relevant to the page and to your own business.
Develop an XML Sitemap
What an XML sitemap does is to make it much easier for a search engine robot to index all your pages. There are a number of free tools available that can help you to develop a relevant XML sitemap to go with your site which you can then register with Google Webmaster Tools. A sitemap is the most efficient way of letting Google know what’s going on with your website and what pages link to what. It also saves their search robots time when indexing your page to provide as results for a search.
Respect the Google Godfather
Google is the godfather of the internet and the offers it makes you really can’t refuse. Billions of searches per day? Free analytics tools to help you make your site better? All you have to do is to follow the rules and develop your site around their (very well streamlined) guidance and all this will benefit you to a major degree. Frankly, it is far more feasible for a business to be on Google’s good side than to try to game the search engine. You know what happens to people who go against the Godfather, right?
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