If I chuck in enough keywords, Google will rank me top, won’t they?

or

Can you guarantee me a number one position on Google?

Both of these questions I hear fairly frequently as a web developer and with this blog post I hope to highlight the mystery behind how search engines such as Google work and how you can create a site that maximizes your search engine potential.

Google is great because it puts sites at the top of its search listing because they “deserve” to be there, not because they “want” to be there the most.

Of course, there are ways and means to help your site get to the top of Google’s rankings and I hope to shed some light into how Google and other search engines work and what they look for when ranking sites.

How do search engines work?

So, first some boring basic information on how search engines function -

Search engines run automated programs called “spiders” or “robots” - they “crawl” the pages that make up the World Wide Web. Once a page has been crawled, the contents are then indexed and stored.

There are a number of things that will hinder these spiders, and stop them from crawling your site - such as over complex URLs, pages overloaded with links and pages buried more than 3 clicks away from the home page.

The key to ensuring your entire site can be indexed by search engines is to provide direct links to each page on your site. If you have pages more than one click away from the home page then a sitemap can be a big help and can direct these spiders accordingly to ensure all your pages get indexed and stored.

How does my site get ranked?

Modern Search engines such as Google will measure your site based on these 3 main things -

Relevance
Popularity
Trust

Relevance - Document Analysis - how close a match your content is to the users query. Google will search to see if the words or phrase being searched for appears in important areas of your site - eg. the title, meta data, heading, and body. Google will also attempt to measure the quality of the document containing the searched phrase or words. This is done in a rather complex way, but the main thing to know is that repeating important phrases over and over will only work against you.

Popularity - Link Analysis - your site and pages importance. This is measured by the number of people who are linking to your site/page and it also takes into account what they are saying about your site. The sites linking to you can also affect your ranking. More trusted sites gain a higher ranking than others, so, say for example a .gov site were linking to your site then this would gain a high level of trust, or even just a site that Google rates to be a popular ‘trusted’ site.

Trust - The web is a huge commercial place with millions of sites all competing for the top search engine spots. Search engines have been quick to learn you can not always trust a website to be honest about their importance. So, long gone are the days when filling in as many meta tag words as possible and filling your pages with keywords would get you noticed by search engines. It is now down to quality content and careful and considerate coding.

What do you mean by considerate coding?

Hyperlinks - word your links carefully. A click HERE for more info. Does not really tell us or the search engine much. But - see jennies blog post on SEO, gives us much more information.

Images - ensure all your images have proper alt text tags. For example this picture below could easily just be given an alt tag of “Cat” - although that does not really tell someone with little or no vision using a screen reader what that image really is. Something like “A ginger cat scratching outside” would be more appropriate. Thoughtful picture tagging will also pick you up a lot of “Google images” searches.