Search Engine Optimisation on Google is All About Answers
Many internet marketers and web editors approach search engine optimisation with the wrong things in mind. They create skyscraper content, compile resources from around the web, form listicles and more, but find their rankings unimproved and their traffic petering out.
To keep your website from disappearing from target search results altogether, a bit of a paradigm shift is needed. In crafting content, you need to place a much larger emphasis on questions and, most importantly, answers to those questions if you want to make upward moves in Google’s search results.
How Google Works
When web marketers and bloggers acquainted with the fickle nature of Google’s search results discuss improving page ranking and visibility, they often refer to what goes on behind the scenes at Google as being a part of their vague and nebulous “algorithm”.
Thinking of Google as a masked overlord moving in mysterious ways behind an impenetrable curtain, however, is not the most helpful way to approach things if you intend to optimise your website’s performance and position in global search results.
Instead, we can get the broad details of Google Search’s design directly from Google itself.
Crawling
Figuring out what is new on the Internet is like looking for freshly added books in a library the size of New York City, except the library grows at a rate of one million new users per day and reserves new shelves (domain names in this sprawling metaphor) at a rate of roughly 1.4 million per yearly quarter.
All of this unprecedented growth appears to have no end in sight as only about 40% of the world’s population had an Internet connection in 2018. Thus, the way Google gets around online has grown ever more complex. At present, the task is handled through sophisticated programs known as web crawlers – and yes, you can call them spiders too.
Google’s web crawling programs run autonomously, traipsing the confines of known domains through their sitemaps and following links to new pages wherever they appear.
Indexing
The information that Google’s web crawlers bring back gets added to their search index – an actual running record of every single word found on every page of every website that is crawled. This incredible feat of record-keeping results in what Google calls the “Knowledge Graph,” which is used to further enrich the results each user’s search delivers.
Based on a confluence of factors, individual web pages are added to search results at higher or lower positions. Your page’s place on the search result totem pole depends on its relevance, publish date, social momentum and more. In fact, the factors considered for ranking specific pages in Google’s search results are so complex that human reviewers are called upon to help out.
A Human Touch
Google makes use of an international team of search quality evaluators to fully interpret individual pages found online and influence their respective rankings.
These evaluators are held to a strict code of conduct in their work, following guidelines that Google provides to the public for perusal.
A few interesting takeaways from Google’s guidelines are as follows:
“Your Money or Your Life” Pages
When it comes to pages that cover topics of particularly high import to a person’s finances or life in general, Google evaluators abide by more stringent standards than they would otherwise.
These so-called “Your Money or Your Life” pages are more difficult to rank highly both because of such elevated quality standards as well as the surplus of major publications currently dominating qualifying niches.
Examples of these types of pages include news publications, government pages, shopping pages and health content, among others.
Ad-Blocking is Usually Prohibited
Evaluators are subjected to the same experience on a given web page as common visitors – no blocking allowed!
This makes sites with particularly intrusive ads and aggressive marketing techniques a lot less likely to rank highly in Google’s search results.
Page Quality Evaluators Do More Than Visit Websites
Evaluators do not simply load up individual web pages, look at them and then leave. Instead, they will actually stick around for a while to check out linked material and test the available features of the page as well.
Websites with sketchy mechanics and faulty menu elements may take a ranking hit during this phase of the evaluation.
There Are Five “Most Important Factors”
Page Evaluators consider the following elements of a page primarily when making their final assessment:
- Page Purpose
- Trustworthiness and Expertise
- Main Content Quality and Length
- Website Information
- Website Reputation
Quality Over Quantity
Although there are plenty of results delivered in response to most Google searches, they are likely not quite as plentiful as you might think.
Google’s metrics highlighted at the top of each new search page suggest billions of pages worth of relevant results being available for you to sift through, but the truth appears to be that most searches max out on such before you reach page 30.
With less than 10 results per Google search page, that means there are usually less than 300 actual pages delivered for most search phrases – not quite the billion
