A Bit Of History
Google has been constantly evolving as a search engine since it first appeared on the web in 1997. Originally Google was called “BackRub” because it checked backlinks (other sites linking back to the site in question) to estimate the importance of a website. Since then it has surpassed the other major Search Engines of their times – WebCrawler, Lycos, Excite, Inktomi and AltaVista.
Google now accounts for almost 90% of all search engine traffic worldwide – over 3 billion searches per day. The index contains around 30 trillion pages (as of summer 2013) which are regularly visited, or ‘crawled’, by software known as ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’.
At Google’s inception, most of the search engines just counted how many times your search term appeared on the page. The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin thought about this and came up with a better algorithm which they called “PageRank”. This determined the importance of a website by the number of pages, and the importance of the pages, that linked back from other sites on the web. Combined with search phrases within the text this became a much more reliable and accurate method of ranking pages within the engine’s index.
Over the years Google has updated and evolved PageRank and hundreds of other metrics into a complex calculation used to determine website value. The specifics are kept secret to help fight what is known as “Black Hat” optimisation – attempts to manipulate the search engine rankings by using techniques that are inconsistent with Google’s intentions: i.e. to put the most appropriate and useful websites at the top of the list. Black Hat methods are often just attempts to ‘game the system’ by providing content aimed at the search engines and not at human visitors.
“Black Hat” Search Engine Optimisation – The DONT’s
Some of the techniques that are used for black hat optimisation include:
- Keyword Stuffing
Placing keywords repeatedly in pages. For example a photographer might repeatedly place the word “Photographer” and a location at the bottom of the page. e.g. “Photographer York, Photographer Leeds, Photographer Harrogate, Photographer Bradford”. This content offers nothing to a visitor – so it’s clearly something designed to appeal to search engines.
- Invisible Text
Utilising the same font colour and background is a method of hiding passages of text on pages. An example could be creating an entire paragraph of “keyword stuffed” text on your “minimalist” home page which was initially designed to be text free, and placing this copy at the bottom of the black page written in a black font.
- Duplicate Content/Mirror Sites
Google dislikes large swathes of content that is:
- Copied from other sites.
- Another site that is virtually identical to yours.
- Doorway/Gateway Pages
These are individual pages that are designed to perform really well for a specific keyword – e.g. ‘York Photographer’. They are often created on different domains and use keyword stuffing to improve the likelihood of getting a high result. They then funnel traffic through to your website either by automatically redirecting or by displaying a duplicate of the main site’s menu. They offer no real value on their own and are often a way of misleading visitors into thinking that the website is about one thing (e.g. a photographer in York) when in fact it’s about something different (e.g. a photographer who is actually in Leeds).
- Cloaking
Making a page appear differently to search engines and humans. When the page is requested, the web server detects if a search engine or a human is calling. The web server can then present a different page appropriately “stuffed” with keywords and phrases designed to appeal to the search engines. Human visitors see a normal website.
- Link Farms
Once the SEO community had cottoned on to the fact that there was money to be made from the backlink market “Link Farms” sprang up selling backlinks to sites for anything from a few pence to a couple of pounds depending on the ranking of the server. The Farms offered no value in of themselves, instead presenting a huge great list of links to those who had paid for their inclusion. These days Google is clever enough to detect link farms and as such their links are worthless or even detrimental to a site’s ranking.
- Comment Spam
Placing links in blog comments, guest books, wikis and any site that accepts user contributions. Many of these sites are not moderated and the comment spam ends up directly into the page without any interaction from the site owner. Unscrupulous SEO businesses and individuals are known to use automated “Bots” which are capable of crawling the web and finding this type of page to automatically create comments on web pages.
Most of the major search engines can detect these attempts at exploitation, and will mark a site down or even exclude it from the search indexes for breaking the rules. The penalties are clear – the advice? Don’t do it!
“White Hat” Search Engine Optimisation – The DOs
So that’s the don’ts, so here are the dos – “White Hat” search engine optimisation. This is obviously not a definitive guide, but it’ll just explain some of the things that should be taken into consideration when you’re attempting to get a better listing for your site on the search engines.
- Page Content
Put down your content in a form that is acceptable to humans! This doesn’t mean that you can’t keep the search engines in mind while writing it, sprinkling and interspersing it with your search terms. Well written original, appropriate content is valuable and information and articles regarding your services, customers, news, methods and equipment will produce a much more informative and well optimised site than a home page stacked full of words that can not only put off your visitors and could be detrimental to your SEO ranking.
- Keep up to date
Regularly altering, tweaking and adding information will notify the search engines that the site is active and your customers are kept up-to-date with information regarding your business. If you can, write blog posts, tweet about relevant subjects and attract people to visit your site and hopefully link to your content.
- Headings
A well-structured site should use “h” tags within the HTML to express headings rather than explicit font sizes. The search engine will read these and know to place extra emphasis on the phrases within.
- Page Titles & Descriptions
These are “Tags” that appear within the HTML that makes up your pages. Google will use your page titles within its index to describe your site to the people who are searching. If you’ve not set descriptions on your pages then Google will attempt to use text from within your page. These tags should be relevant and appropriate to each page of your website – and should describe in simple terms what someone should expect if they visit the page.
- Domain Names and URL’s
Recent updates to the Google algorithm reduced the importance of matching the domain name against a keyword phrase. So if you owned the domain “lefthandedwidgets.co.uk”, searching for “left handed widgets” no longer has quite the same impact as it used to do – but nevertheless it is still quite important. The same applies to URL’s. Friendly URL’s are ranked higher than machine read parameters. e.g. lefthandedwidgets.co.uk/screwfittings-green will probably do better than lefthandedwidgets.co.uk?p=22332.
- Analyse your Traffic
Add Google Analytics to your site. The information it provides is invaluable in helping you to work out how visitors arrived on your site, how to get them to stay for longer and how to keep them coming back.
These are techniques every website should employ to produce decent useful content and a well structured website. As a happy side-effect this will make you more attractive to the search engines – easier to browse and worthy of a higher rank in the results.
