Google Wants It Easy

SEO, (or search engine optimization, to increase their chances of being found in the search engines, but there is a lot of confusion as to how Google reads a web page.

If you read what Google has to say about the topic, it is relatively simple. When you do a search, Google reads thetag first. This is the line above the URL of your web page.

The second thing Google does is read the meta description tag located in thearea of your HTML. The meta description is a brief description of what your page is about. Google has said they no longer read the meta keywords tag, but they do still read the meta description tag.

Then the search engine will check the images fortags. This tag contains a decription of the image. Google cannot read images but they read the ALT tag instead.

The other things that can impact your Google ranking are your keywords and your navigation. Think about how someone would find your site. What keywords would they use? And use these words on your page. Make sure you check your keyword density. You want to keep it around 2% – 5%. This means for every 100 words of copy, you want to use your keywords 2 – 5 times.

The navigation should be very well planned and you want the user to click as few times as possible to get to the page they are looking for. Generally 2 – 3 clicks from the main navigation bar.

Another thing you can do to help your search results is to create great content. Remember to write for humans first and then write for the search engines. Your content should make sense and clearly describe what the page is about.

Backlinks are a huge factor in how your page ranks in the search results and social media is playing more of a role. But that is a topic for a future article.

If you do all of these things, you should start seeing your search engine rankings improve. Of course, this is an extremely simplified version of the big picture for SEO, but it will give you a good start.

What I just gave you is the tip of the iceberg. It takes constant research to keep up with the latest SEO strategies because Google and Bing are constantly changing their algorithm. There are new things to learn about SEO almost everyday, so it takes a considerable time commitment.

Keyword research and all the other tasks attached to improving your SEO are very time consuming and require very intense research to do properly. But with a little patience and a lot of time, you will see results.