Got some time to spare?  Head on over to Google’s official easter egg game and relax for a bit!

I’m a big fan of Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-SPAM czar. Matt is the man in charge of Google’s Webspam team and he often expresses his opinions along with helpful hints and tips on his blog. In addition to being a friendly blogger and conference speaker, Matt often posts nuggets that help us “ordinary” folks better understand Google’s algorithm and figure out how to work with the Googlebot.

Working with Google and doing our best to give it the kinds of information it wants is probably the best way to perform well in Google’s search results. While I (at times) applaud Google for their work, I often feel as though so much more could be done to help people work better with it. They’re not very specific but at the same time they provide a lot of information to help newbies create crawlable content.

It’s clear to me that there are 2 sides to Google: The search side and what I call the “show” side. The search side is self explanatory. That’s the part of the site where millions of people go to every day and look for webpages and information that they want to find. Be it for research or entertainment, Google’s search side of things is a well-oiled machine that is super easy to use and relatively easy to find the information that you’re looking for. Technicalities aside (this is a topic for another post), Google gives its search users what they want in a simple, quick, and relevant fashion. The “show” side, on the other hand, is not as simple to define but I claim that this side includes the Google Adwords ads, and every page that is displayed with a search result, including the search snippets and word highlighting.

As a publisher, it is obvious that whenever I make a web page I want it to appear above everybody else’s result. Regardless of whether the page is unique or has 10,000,000 competitors, I want searchers to find my page because I either think it’s relevant and will make their lives better or I stand to make money from it. Sometimes it is a combination of both. This page can be found through regular search or through ad placement via Adwords. This is where Google’s Catch-22 comes in. How doe Google qualify a page such that it ranks it above or below other pages? How does Google use its algorithm to place certain Adwords ads above or below other similarly priced ads? How does Google determine what to charge and Adwords advertiser?

The rest of this post will focus on the organic search results. The Adwords questions will have to wait for another post.

Although the answers to these questions are not clear nor are they stated anywhere officially, I have come up with a set of criteria that I believe help the user to figure out how to maneuver so that their results receive better treatment from Google. I do not claim that these are 100% original nor do I expect these to be 100% accurate; these are my speculations and opinions and I reserve the right to be wrong.

As you can see I believe that Google places the most emphasis on incoming links, followed by keyword density and lastly by readability. There are other factors too such as age of site and freshness of content, but I don’t believe they are weight too heavily so I allocated 5% for all of those items.

Incoming Links

I believe that incoming links account for 50% of your website’s SERP. Case and point: I have a website that has not been worked on very recently, but right after I bought the domain I spent a few weeks adding it to as many directories as I could. The directories were all semi-relevant to the domain name and I managed to add roughly 75 incoming links to the site in about a month. Even though I am able to see all but a few of those links when searching for them (using the “link:domain name” command while performing a search query on the Google site), the site still shows up in the top 100 for a keyword with medium competition. The content for the site is readable, but its keyword density is scattered and not focused. I believe that if I spent a few days boning up the content, that site would perform much better than it is currently. Hence my belief that incoming links account for 50% of your SERP score.

Keyword Density

Coming in at number 2, I think that there is a fine balance between too many and not enough keywords on a website to rank well for a page. I want to venture a guess that a page may not be stuffed with more than 4% and no less than 1% in order for the keyword density to be in the “safe” zone. If you have too many keywords, your site could be thought of as spam. If you don’t have enough keywords sprinkled throughout your text, your site may not show up at all in the results. There’s a fine balance and I believe that it is more science than art or luck.

Readability

Google wants people to be able to use the site, not robots. For this reason, they have created a set of murky guidelines that “help” webmasters to know how they should be designing and developing their websites. Within these guidelines, Google recommends:

“Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.”

This means that the crawler looks for text and text only. If you have too many flashy things going on with the site, Google may not be able to “understand” your page and in turn, it won’t be ranked correctly.

Other

This last category is pretty open-ended. There are several things that belong here such as content freshness, how relevant your domain name is to your content, age of the domain and relevancy of links, meta tags, and others. Since this area is not clear, I won’t go too far into this topic but will say that Google does care about those factors. I may not be giving enough importance to these, or I may be giving too much importance to these. Regardless, those are tidbits that I have picked up from reading the webmaster guidelines and have not seen them play too much of a role in the SERP of my sites.

Conclusion

So, in an effort to please the searchers and work with the publishers, Google is on a never ending quest to beat spammers, while the spammers are on a never ending quest to beat Google. This catch-22 will, I believe, in the long run hurt the “litte guy” like me. I’m not necessarily trying to make a ton of money from organic search results on Google with this page. I’m not promoting “enhancement” products nor am I trying to sell you anything. However, my site will remain lower on the list than someone with more links than me or someone that has a higher keyword density than me. I’ll continue to build links and do my best to write for content and not search engines, but I just can’t help myself at being frustrated at Google for not spelling out how it is that they work. Better SERP is everyone’s goal, but I think if Google provided more clear guidelines, not only would they have less SPAM but they would also have a better way at filtering it.

Google is all that really matters right now as far as search engine optimization goes. As a good SEO, I’ve done my best on my websites to make sure that Google can:
1: Crawl the site
2: Find appropriate content based on searches
3: Place my site well within certain keywords
Those things, of course, are all easier said than done. Nobody really knows how Google works and no one can say with any degree of certainty if a certain strategy will indeed work to place your site well on Google’s search results. It was with some delight that I saw this video yesterday that Matt Cutts posted on his Blog.
Matt talks about how Google creates the snippets that you read when a Google result is returned and from where the information comes from. I found it interesting that he did talk about meta tags in the video; something which I had heard before as being obsolete. It’s also interesting that he only teases us about creating sitelinks but he never really talks about how to structure your site so that sitelinks are created by Google’s magic algorithm.
I enjoyed this video and wish that they would do some kind of an SEO Tutorial series highlighting the imprtant aspects of SEO. This is a good start and I have already made improvements to my sites based on this video.

Yesterday Google announced that it had partnered with GoDaddy in order to provide webmasters more ready access to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This partnership is supposed to make adding a site to Google’s WMT and verifying it more straightforward and faster.

When I went to my GoDaddy account center I was not able to find this functionality yet, but here is a snipped of the official Google writeup:

Go Daddy users will now see our link right in their hosting control center, and can launch Google Webmaster Tools directly from their hosting account. And Go Daddy makes the Google Webmaster Tools account creation process faster by adding the site, verifying the site, and submitting Sitemaps on behalf of hosting customers. Our tools show users how Google views their site, give useful stats like queries and links, diagnose problems, and share information with us in order to improve their site’s visibility in search results.

I’m glad to hear about this latest partnership between Google and GoDaddy. I think it will make site management a little easier and it may even speed up the time it takes for a site to get indexed at Google.
Do you have a GoDaddy account yet? If not, switch today and start receiving the benefits Google will offer GoDaddy’s members!

Yesterday I wrote that I liked a lot of things Google has to offer its users. As a user, I am fond of Google and its offerings. However, as a marketer and budding webtrepreneur, I must say that there are several things that drive me crazy about Google. Google represents more than just a search engine when you’re a web developer. As a content creator, Google represents your challenge. Some may even say that Google is their nemesis. What I mean is that Google can make or break your business and dreams. One day the engine may rank you favorably, and the next day you may be gone from the first hundred pages of results, rendering your site invisible.

Organic search is, in my opinion, the best way to get traffic. Not only is it free, but it drives in people that are looking for your content. In contrast to advertisements, social media sites, or forum communities where people click through and stay on your site for less than 30 seconds, organic search results drive curious people who are looking for what you have to say and these people are the ones who are most likely to buy what you are selling. Your search ranking on Google or any other engine (but really, do they matter that much?) can equate to a lot of money or it can make you cry at night because you are not even bringing in enough money to bay for your hosting bill.

It is from this perspective, the perspective of a website builder and content provider, that I write this list. This represents what I find most frustrating and difficult about Google and feel that I can’t possibly be the only one on the entire Internet who feels this way.

SERP Fluctuation

SERP (Search Engine Results Page or Search Engine Ranking Position) is how high or low your website ranks when someone does a search for a given term. For example, a search for “Nicaraguan coffee” yields over 1.3 million results. If you are serious about internet marketing and are actively trying to make money from a site that sells Nicaraguan coffee, then the ‘rank’ that you receive from the search is very important. If you don’t come up in the first 10 spots, your profitability drops very rapidly. That is why SERP is so important. If you place well, you can stand to get a lot of visitors and make a lot of money.

This is my #1 frustration with Google. It is impossible to know exactly how Google ranks certain pages. From experience, I have been nearly driven mad. One day I had a term ranking #2. It brought me a lot of traffic for a certain niche and I was making about $60 a day. Too bad that this only lasted for 3 days. The 4th day after ranking at #2 consistently, my site started showing up at #146. I’m not making this up. I did not change the site other than add quality content to it but the site stayed at #146 or lower for about 2 months. Sometimes the site wouldn’t show up at all even after I searched over 400 results. It is finally making its way back up the list but it caused me to nearly quit that site.

Backlinks

Simply put, backlinks are links from other sites to your site. It is assumed that the number of backlinks coming into your site affect your search engine rankings. My opinion is that more backlinks help to place a site better on a results page. Google even offers a way for you to check for backlinks to your site. The problem is, I’ve never had a site show up in those results. I don’t know what Google considers a backlink but their backlink check only ever returns 1 results in all of the sites that I own. It’s rather frustrating, especially if building backlinks is the foundation of results placement.

SPAM Sites Do Well

Along the lines of SERPs comes the topic of SPAM. In certain niches in which I have sites, there are a handful of sites that are completely crap but they rank higher than me. These sites include sites with only 1 page, sites with irrelevant domain names, and sites that are written very poorly. How is that fair? I spend a lot of time making sure my sites are accurate, well written, standards compliant, more accessible, etc…and somehow they end up at the bottom of the pile.

My lesson so far has been to not give up. Eventually, I hope, Google will have its algorithm squared away in a way that it will eliminate the SPAM and eat up the ham. I just hope that day arrives soon.