Dutton & Co Internet Marketing Blog

Fig. 1

Most Popular Search Engines (First Quarter 2011) SOURCE: http://gs.statcounter.com

With Google owning over 90% of the search engine market [see Fig. 1, Source: gs.statcounter.com], it is imperative for Internet marketers to have at least a basic understanding of how Google Search and Google’s website ranking algorithm work and how to market their websites to achieve a high Google ranking.

This report aims to provide marketers with a foundation knowledge of Google’s search engine and explain some of the most important factors that influence how high a website ranks in Google.

Because it is aimed at marketers and not computer programmers or mathematicians, I have tried to keep technical jargon to a minimum and, where industry jargon is used, an explanation of the terms will be provided.

The information within this report is based on my own experience as an Internet Marketer and my own research. If anyone disagrees with any of my findings or has further information or personal experiences that could increases the usefulness of this report, I’d welcome your comments at the bottom of the page

A Simplistic Description of How Google Works
Google has a gigantic database of almost every single public webpage on the Internet.

But how do these webpages get into the Google database? To fill their database, Google uses a computer program called a crawler, or more specifically Googlebot. Googlebot traverses the Internet reading webpages, making copies of them and adding them to the Google database – or, as explained on the Google corporate website:

A crawler visits a page, copies the content and follows the links from that page to the pages linked to it, repeating this process over and over until it has crawled billions of pages on the web.
SOURCE: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html#section-search

So, Google has a big database of webpages, and it is these webpages that Google displays in it’s search results when someone searches for something along with a link to the original copy of the webpage. The next question is, how does Google know which webpages to display in it’s search results? For example, if you do a Google search for lawyers, why do you get results that relate to lawyers and not accountants?

This is where the Google Algorithm comes into play. The Google Algorithm is a secret mathematical formula that converts your search terms into relevant search results (more details on this later). You tell the Google Algorithm a search term and it gives you all the webpages that it thinks have some relevance to your query ranked in order from what it thinks is most relevant at the top to what it thinks is least relevant at the bottom.

A diagram of how Google’s database, Googlebot, the Google Algorithm and Google Search interact can be seen in Fig. 2 below:

Fig. 2

A Simplistic Diagram of How Google Search Works

What Does This Mean For Marketers?
The ultimate aim of the Internet Marketer is to sell as many units of their product/service/offer as possible, which often means getting their website viewed by as many potential customers as possible. Each potential customer that visits a website is referred to as a Visitor and all visitors are referred to as Traffic.

There are a number of ways to generate traffic to a website that are beyond the scope of this report including using Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter and utilising PPC ads such as Google Adwords. There are also specific methods for getting traffic from other search engines such as YAHOO! and Microsoft’s Bing but because Google serves over 90% of search queries [see fig. 1], traffic generation from Google Search is perhaps the most important skill for all online marketers to learn and the reason for Google being the focus of this report.

Having discussed (briefly) how Google works and understanding that our aim is to get as many potential customers to visit our website as possible, it is logical to assume that to generate visitors from Google Search, we must ensure:

1. Our website is visited by Googlebot and included in Google’s database of webpages.
2. When someone performs a Google Search using search terms related to our product/service/offer, our website should be included in Google’s search results.
3. Our website should be as close to the top of the search results as possible.

The third point is particularly important as the 2008 study by iProspect and JupiterResearch discovered that 68% of search engine users clicked on a search result within the first page of results (or first 10 Google results). The Executive Summary of the report states:

[These findings underscore] the continued importance for marketers to ensure that their digital assets are found within the first three pages, if not the first page, of search results.
SOURCE: http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2008_blendedsearchresults.htm

Getting Googlebot to Come Visit
So the  first thing an Internet Marketer must do is ensure that their webpages are visited by Googlebot and included in Google’s database from which search results are plucked from.

We already know that Googlebot works by traversing the Internet collecting webpages and following links on the webpages it finds to locate more webpages. Googlebot also regularly re-visits webpages that it knows about to see if they have been updated and, if so, the updates are recorded in the Google database. Webpages that are updated regularly are visited by Googlebot more frequently.

If a website has existed for a while, chances are that Googlebot already knows about it and it is simply a matter of  waiting around for it’s next visit (although the techniques for new websites described below can be used to get Googlebot to visit sooner).

If a website is new, it  makes sense that if a link to it is published on another website (preferably one that is updated regularly), then when Googlebot visits this external webpage it will find the link and come and check the new website out. There are many websites out there that will allow the placing of links on them for free including article directories, business directories, forums or even by commenting on someone else’s blog. As a sidenote, you can get my report on 40 Kickasstastic Ways To Get Backlinks to your website when you subscribe to my free newsletter.

Another method that can be used to inform Googlebot that it should come and check out a website is by using Google’s Blog Ping service. Simply enter the address of a website, click the button and Googlebot will put the website on it’s TODO list. Although this service is meant for blogs only, it can be used to let Google know about any website. Personally, I use Google Blog Ping to tell Google whenever I create a new website or update an existing one. Another useful tool is Ping-o-matic, which ‘pings’ a number of websites including Google’s Blog Ping (although I always ping Google Blog Ping separately just to be sure).

Having pinged and/or created backlinks, Googlebot should visit a website within the next 24 hours – although it will take a little longer before Google has indexed the website in it’s database and is ready to include it in it’s search results.

Getting a High Ranking in Google Part 1: Keyword Research
So, we’ve told Googlebot about our website and it has come along and made a copy of our webpages for the Google database. Our webpages now have the potential to be served to Google users in their search results. Unfortunately, getting your website listed on the first page (or even the first three pages) of Google is no easy task.

The first thing we need to decide is what search terms or Keywords we should aim to rank for. To do this we need to perform Keyword Research, then we can optimise our website for those particular search terms. Perhaps the best free tool to research keywords (and the one I use) is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Simply type in a potential keyword and the Keyword Tool will tell you approximately how many times each month the keyword is searched for as well as a number of related keyword suggestions. For a new website, the keywords you choose should have no more than 5000 global searches every month – anything more will be, in all probability, too difficult to compete for.

After choosing a few keywords, type them into the Google search engine and check out your competition. If there’s a lot of results (millions) and the big corporations and organisations from your industry can be found on the first page of search results, chances are that the keyword you’re aiming for is too competitive and you should try something different. For example, if you are marketing the website of a small construction firm then don’t try to get on the first page of Google for the search term ‘builders’. Instead, try to rank for a less competitive niche such as ‘coventry builders’ or ‘builders in coventry’. Remember that Google has to rank all websites according to what it thinks is relevant so it is unlikely that you will persuade it that your brand new, untested local building firm is more relevant than a national construction corporation with 30 years experience in the trade!

Keyword research is an extensive topic and could have a report unto itself (in fact, it’s something I may cover in a future blog post) so I’m going to end this topic here, however if anyone knows of a brilliant keyword research guide, I’d be more than happy to post a link to it here.

Getting a High Ranking in Google Part 2: The Google Algorithm
We know that the Google Algorithm is used to make sure that we get good, relevant search results from Google when we perform a search and, as marketers, we realise that if we knew how the Google Algorithm worked, we’d know how to make our own websites rank highly for our keywords.

Unfortunately, the algorithm is known only to Google and has always been a closely guarded secret privy to only a few highly-trusted Google employees. What’s more, the algorithm is very complicated and difficult to understand, using over 200 factors to rank websites and is constantly revised:

Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis.
SOURCE: http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html#section-search

The good news is that over the years, Internet marketers have been able to reverse engineer the algorithm to a certain extent, so we have a rough idea of the factors we can attempt to influence to improve our search engine rankings.  Another great source of information about how Google works (or worked in it’s original form) can be found in the original research paper of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – although this was published over a decade ago, many of these ideas presented in this paper still exist in Google today. The most important factors to get top Google rankings (in my experience) are presented below and can be divided into two categories; on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation.

On-Page Optimisation
On-page optimisation refers to optimisation techniques that you can perform on your own webpages to improve their ranking in Google’s search results.

Perhaps the most important is to include your keyword in the <title> and <h1> HTML tags. These are the most important places to give Google the heads-up on what your webpage is about. If you use a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal and have no idea what HTML tags are, just make sure that your keywords are included in the box where you type in the title for the webpage and your CMS will automatically do this for you.

Internal linking is very important too. This refers to linking between webpages on your own website. Of course, you already have your navigation links either at the top of your website or on a sidebar so that visitors can find their way around your website but Google seems to like links that are included within the body of your webpage more. So, as you’re writing a webpage look for places where you could put a link to another page on your website. This could be an inline link or perhaps a bullet list of related articles at the foot of the webpage. It is imperative that the anchor text of these links contain your keywords - the reason for this will be discussed later in Off-Page Optimisation.

It is also important to ensure your keyword is included within the body of your webpage and, to a lesser extent, the address of your webpage.

The META description and META keywords tags are also a great place to include your keywords, although don’t worry about these too much.

Off-Page Optimisation
Off-page optimisation refers to optimising your webpage without doing anything to your webpage itself. This is where you will learn the single most  important method of getting a high ranking in Google: Backlink Building.

Backlink Building is the process of getting links to your website from other websites. When performing backlink building, the two things you must always remember are:

1. The more authoritative the website you are getting the backlink from, the better.
2. Always try to include your keywords in the anchor text of each backlink.

In a moment, I’ll discuss how to find out whether a website is authoritative or not and how to get a backlink, but first I want to explain why using keywords in the anchor text is so important – actually I’ll let the founders of Google, Sergey and Larry do the explaining:

Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves. Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases.
SOURCE: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

The Google Algorithm thinks very, very highly of the anchor text in links – more than any on-page optimisation factor. To offer a little proof in this regard, simply type the search term “click here” into Google Search and the number one ranked webpage is Adobe Reader’s download page, yet the words ‘click here’ are nowhere to be found on the page at all. Adobe Reader has ranked top for this search term because of all the millions of websites that have PDF’s on them along with a ‘click here to download adobe reader’ link.

This reinforces why backlink-building for your webpages is so important – the anchor text in your backlinks will be used by Google as the primary source for what search terms your webpage is ranked for. If someone does a Google search for the term ‘george eliot poems’, nine times out of ten the number one result will be the website that has the most backlinks from the most authoritative websites which use the term ‘george eliot poems’ in the anchor text.

So, every link you have to a webpage can be considered as a kind of vote of confidence from the link provider and the anchor text tells Google exactly what the website is about. But all votes are not equal – if that were the case, we could just set up a thousand free blogs all with links containing our keywords that point to our website. In fact, Google rates these types of webpages as very low in authority and a link from a newly-made free blog will give you very little (if any) improvement in your search engine rankings. The same is true of many article websites, directories and social bookmarking websites and just about any website where you can quickly create a free backlink for yourself – these webpages are referred to as having low authority.

In comparison, a single backlink from a webpage that Google believes is highly authoritative is worth perhaps thousands of low authority backlinks. Examples of high authority websites include universities, big corporations and long-standing organisations and charities.

So, how can we tell which webpages Google thinks are highly authoritative? The best way of finding out is by checking out a webpage’s PageRank. PageRank is Google’s way of classifying the authority of a webpage and each webpage is given a PageRank of between 0 and 10 (there’s actually also a PageRank of n/a, which means that Google hasn’t yet given a webpage a PageRank, hasn’t published the PageRank or the webpage has been penalised).

Most webpages have a PageRank of 0 and very few webpages have a PageRank of 10 (Facebook’s homepage is one of the few PageRank 10 webpages). Everything else is in between. Your primary focus should be to get backlinks from webpages with a PageRank of 4, 5 and 6 followed by webpages with a PageRank of 1, 2 and 3. The table below shows the relationship between PageRank, Authority and the difficulty level of getting backlinks:

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t have backlinks from PageRank 0 and n/a webpages – any backlink adds to your popularity. It simply means that your time is better spent aiming to get backlinks from webpages with a higher authority.

The inner workings of PageRank is very complicated and outside the scope of this report but it is based primarily on authoritative backlinks – so as you are building your backlinks to perform better in Google’s search results, you are also contributing to the PageRank/Authority  of your own website. For further detailed information about PageRank, I recommend going through eFactory’s PageRank website.

To  find out the PageRank of a particular webpage, you can either use an online service such as PageRankChecker or install the Google Toolbar in your web browser and visit the page (you need to go into the options of the Google Toolbar to enable the PageRank tool).

Be aware that the PageRank is taken from Google’s servers and the data is old and is updated fairly infrequently, so don’t take it as gospel. A website listed as having a PageRank of 1 could actually have a PageRank 5 and vice versa but you’d never know. Nevertheless, the published PageRank of a website is a useful guide to it’s authority.

So, how do we get backlinks  from highly authoritative website? The webmasters of these high PageRank websites aren’t going to link to any old crap so you need to give them a very good reason to link you. This involves a two-step process:

1. Create some unique and awesome content on your website.
2. Ask them very nicely to link to it.

It may seem a little over-simplistic but this is a tried and time-tested process that really works. For example, if you have a website about bonsai trees and want a link from the American Bonsai Society, write a webpage about a particular sub-topic of bonsai that no-one else has written about (e.g. photographing bonsai). Another webpage about bonsai for beginners in an already saturated market just isn’t interesting – you need to offer something that no-one else does.

Then it’s just a matter of asking for them to link to your webpage. I have a number of email templates I use for this purpose, but it basically involves:

1. Congratulating them on a great website and thanking them for the information they provide.
2. Telling them about your webpage and why you think it would be useful to their visitors.
3. Details of your webpage including web address and anchor text.
4. Thanking them for considering linking to.

Of course, the other other way to get backlinks from highly authoritative webpages is to own or have control of highly authoritative webpages yourself -  but that’s the subject of a whole new post altogether

Summary
Here is a brief summary of the main points of this report and what you need to do to rank high in Google:

• Get your website into Google’s database by getting Googlebot to visit (backlinks/pinging).
• Aim to rank for keywords that strike a happy medium between competitiveness and potential visitors.
• Use your keywords in your webpage’s <title> and <h1> tags and in the anchor text  of internal links.
• Create some kickass unique content and get lots of backlinks from authority webpages with a PageRank of between 1 and 6.

Of course, not all Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation is as simple as I’ve made it sound but the techniques I’ve discussed will work around 85% of the time. Google treats some search terms and types of webpages differently to others and sometimes you’ll find a crappy webpage is ranking higher than you and you can’t for the life of you work out why! Just keep at it, continue to test and never let your thirst for knowledge dry up. Welcome to the wonderful world of Internet Marketing

I hope you’ve found this report useful and I welcome your comments below.

Be sure to come back next month for my next Internet Marketing post and in the meantime, why not sign up for my free newsletter

Bye for now,

Danny

3 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

1. The Backlink Monster: Powerful SEO Software - Backlink Profit Monster Review
   July 6th, 2011 at 11:06 pm #

   [...] substance than a link from a website that has a low PR and has nothing in common with your website (more on ranking high in Google here). So, how does BPM locate relevant and authoritative websites? The method is simplicity itself. [...]

2. 

   Jose Morgan
   July 7th, 2011 at 7:54 pm #

   Google announced a few weeks ago its version of the Facebook “Like” button, a search results tool called “+1.”  And as much as it appears to be a duplicate of something that’s already popular, Google’s biggest selling point for this feature may be the ability to filter search results into something more administrable. Get +1 likes without a Button

3. 

   cardaddy
   July 20th, 2011 at 2:30 am #

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