How can I get to the top of Google?

There is no surprise that SEO Basics are top of mind for anyone who wants to be successful online – a massive 3.5 billion searches take place each and every day on Google alone, accounting for 92.74% of all search traffic.

It’s how most people start their search for a business or service, making a front page listing extremely important to your bottom line.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is big business in its own right. Hundreds of companies centre their entire operation on charging vast sums to ensure that your business beats out the competition for that top rank. It can feel like a murky process; often providing services that are difficult to understand or really see from the website itself.

The truth is that SEO doesn’t need to remain a complicated “other” – and anyone taking their business online can understand the golden rules required for quality, robust SEO that gives your business the best opportunity to compete in the online search game.

It is really very simple: Google reads (or “crawls”) the web intermittently, and based on its calculations, determines the best possible results based on the keywords entered into the search bar.

But what are those calculations? This is where web developers and SEO companies like to take what I call the “bad car mechanic” approach. Instead of taking the time to talk through, in layman’s terms, the options available and explanation of the investment against reward, you’ll hear jargon such as “meta tags”, XML Sitemaps, no-indexing, backlinks and canonical URLS. It’s only natural to say “hey – you’re the expert do what you need to do”. Unfortunately, this can lead to expensive, inefficient solutions that take advantage of a client’s lack of technological expertise.

“Google reads (or “crawls”) the web intermittently, and based on its calculations, determines the best possible results based on the keywords entered into the search bar.”

While the actual algorithms and calculations Google makes when determining search rank are a closely guarded secret (making the company almost $3000 a second), following some clearly defined best practises are enough to ensure your site is competitive in the search ranking sweepstakes. To be in contention your site requires (in plain English):

Clean & efficiently written code, built with mobile devices in mind. This immediately puts your website in Google’s good books. Display errors on the mobile internet (which is more than 57% of all web traffic) will hurt you before you begin. Any functions like ordering or booking appointments often break on mobile if not built correctly. Business owners who already have a web presence that may be outdated or display awkwardly on mobile devices should start here before making any other improvements.

Quick loading times and data draw. If your site doesn’t load efficiently, tries to display images that are large or not optimized for the web (IE straight from a camera), or puts unnecessary drain on a mobile device’s data plan, you will find yourself quickly slipping down the rankings.

Clear keyword strategy. This means ensuring that the search terms you want to be associated with are established when building your site, and permeate throughout in both the content and potential page addresses. You’ll notice the address (URL) of this page has the keywords I want google to register and help it to know what is contained. The keywords are also throughout this article, helping google to crawl through and identify it as a good result to show if someone searches these items.

Time. Google is careful with what it displays on the front page, and is weary of sites that have emerged recently as they have less of an established track record of providing what they claim to provide. While a new website can emerge quickly on the front page with a set of very specific keywords (IE Mike Watson Web Design Brantford), work to improve rankings for more common search titles often take 6 months or more to register properly with Google’s algorithms.

How else does Google know if you and your site is reliable? If other sites are linking to your site’s address, that indicates to Google that you have a degree of reliability and usefulness, and so help it decide you deserve a higher ranking result. Blogging, social media and any other opportunity to direct traffic to your address across the web aggregate and help improve the standing of your result in comparison to others. Building your ‘Domain Authority’ is a constant process that takes years to build equity.

This list is by no means exhaustive in explaining SEO basics, but does provide some of the main principles needed to get up there in the google rankings. Registering your site with Google Search Console and taking steps recommended by the search engine itself is another must-have. If your looking for a great place to learn more on SEO, Google themselves produced a great set of explainer videos to get started: