Google SEO Guide - An Introduction to Google Rankings

By Brandon Cornett
© 2012, All rights reserved

According to comScore, Google accounted for about 66% of all search queries in 2012. What does this mean to you, as a website owner? It means you should understand and implement the basic concepts of search engine optimization / SEO for Google. And that's exactly what we are going to discuss in this article.

Author's Note: Search engines are a work in progress. So is this article. As Google continues to make changes to its ranking algorithm, I will continue to update my Google SEO guide. This is an "organic" lesson that gets updated on a regular basis. This article was last updated on March 5, 2012.

With that introduction out of the way, here's everything I know about SEO for Google.

Optimizing Your Website for Google

This section provides tips on developing an SEO-friendly website, which is typically the first step in a search engine optimization campaign. We will discuss site structure, organization, design, and other aspects of website development.

• The structure and organization of your website directly contributes to your search engine visibility. If you want Google to find all of your pages, you must organize your website in a logical way with direct linking to key sections.
• Organization is also good for your readers. People can find the information they want more easily on a well organized website.
• Proper organization and structure can improve your Google SEO program in several ways. Primarily, it makes it easier for Google to "crawl" your site and locate all of your individual pages. This helps you get the most out of your search engine optimization program, by boosting visibility for all pages and topics.
• The larger your website is, the more you need to focus on organization and structure. Navigation is straightforward on a 5-page website. You could link to all pages from the home page. But if your site will eventually contain dozens or hundreds of pages, you need to create a logical hierarchy for those pages.
• I recommend that you sketch out the organization of your website on a piece of paper or whiteboard. Think about the main topics that need to appear in your navigation menu, as well as the subtopics that will be grouped below them.
• Here's a Google SEO rule-of-thumb regarding organization. If you make it easy for people to find information on your website, you will also be making it easy for Google to crawl your site. Thus, proper organization benefits your readers and the search engines alike.
• Your website's design and appearance are also important, but in an indirect way. Good design helps you keep people on your site longer, and this can translate into better Google rankings going forward.
• A professionally designed website inspires confidence among visitors. This helps you keep them around longer, thereby reducing your bounce rates. This can directly influence your search engine rankings.

Creating Website Content

Good content is the centerpiece of any search engine optimization program. The Google SEO tips collected below all relate to content in some way. As you will soon see, this is an area where your work is never truly done.

• Useful content in the foundation of an SEO campaign. This is where it all starts. In order to improve your rankings over time, you must offer content that people will find interesting and useful.
• Website content takes many forms. It might be a collection of informative articles like the one you are reading right now. It might be a collection of tools designed to help people accomplish a specific goal (like mortgage calculators). You might even have user-generated content, like the kind you find in forums and social networks.
• Whatever form it takes, your website content must provide value in some way. If you only take one lesson away from the Google SEO guide, make it this one: High-value content is the backbone of a search engine optimization program.
• You should publish new content on a regular basis. For an educational website like this one, this would mean publishing new articles on a daily or weekly basis. Or it might mean introducing new tools and resources for your visitors. You don't ever want your site to become static. A website that stands still will quickly fall behind the competition.
• Frequent publishing helps your Google SEO program in several ways. It keeps people coming back to your site, which sends a positive signal to the search engine's algorithm. It also keeps Google coming back to your website to index all of your new content. Both of these things translate into higher rankings and traffic levels over time -- the two main goals of website optimization.
• You can use keyword research tools to identify topic ideas for your website or blog. This will help you publish new articles, tutorials and news pieces on a regular basis. There are many of these tools available online. Personally, I prefer to use the Google AdWords keyword tool because it suggests related phrases, which I find helpful.
• If you really want to succeed with your SEO program, you must out-publish your competitors. This applies to the quantity and quality of your website content. You must publish more information than your competitors, and it needs to be of a higher quality. Over time, this will result in reader loyalty and better rankings. It also helps you attract links from other websites, which is another key aspect of search engine optimization. We will talk more about link building in the next section of the Google SEO guide.
• If your website includes many pages of content, be sure to practice interlinking between key pages. This is when you link from a certain topic on one page to a related or more in-depth topic on another page. For example, here's an article with more information on getting recognized by search engines. Interlinking makes your website "sticky." It helps people find additional and relevant information, thus keeping them on the site longer. It also contributes to your Google SEO campaign by helping the search engine crawl through your website and index new content.

Do you have content-related questions? Visit the forum section of the site and fire away!

Link Building for SEO

Link building is the act of attracting links from other blogs and websites. This is another key component of SEO for Google, because it increases your "link popularity" over time. This is one of the key ranking factors the search engines use when evaluating websites. With all other things being equal, a site with a higher number of quality inbound links will outrank a website with fewer links. Here's how to put it into practice within your Google SEO campaign.

• In the previous section, we talked about the importance of publishing quality content on a regular basis. This helps your SEO efforts in several ways. Among other things, it will help you attract links from other sites. This tells Google that you have a popular website other publishers find useful. In this context, you can think of an inbound link as a vote of confidence in what you are publishing.
• Acquiring links from big-name websites that already have strong Google rankings will do even more for your SEO program. For instance, if you pick up a citation link from a well-established journal or news website within your industry, it will send a strong signal to the Google algorithm. It will help you boost your rankings over time.
• Link building is an ongoing process. It's also a key aspect of your Google SEO efforts. But the work here is never really done. Think of your website as an ever-growing and constantly evolving entity. As you publish new and useful content on a regular basis, you will slowly but surely acquire new links. This is a fundamental part of your search engine optimization campaign.
• If you've owned a website for any length of time, you have probably received spam e-mails from a link building company. These are people who charge you money to acquire links for you. I recommend that you avoid these companies entirely, because they often use practices that are frowned upon by Google and other search engines. For instance, they often buy links on other websites or engage in reciprocal-linking schemes. Google considers this an attempt to create artificial link popularity. And if they connect your website to this kind of behavior, they might penalize you with lower rankings.
• The best way to acquire links is by publishing tools, resources and information that people find useful. Consider the Wall Street Journal as an example. Millions of bloggers link to this website. But they don't do it because the Journal has paid them to -- they do it because of the quality content published on a regular basis.
• Here's what I want you to take away from this section of the Google SEO guide. The key to attracting links is to publish high-quality content and promote it to a specific audience. For example, you might create some kind of research report that is relevant to your industry, and then promote it to journalists, bloggers and other publishers who cover your industry. In this way, link building, SEO and public relations all work together to achieve a common goal.

Did you know Facebook, Twitter and other social networks can complement your SEO for Google efforts? It's true. The next section of the guide explains how.

Blogging for Google SEO Benefits

I've written a separate article on the SEO benefits of blogging. So I won't repeat all of it here. Instead, let's talk about some of the ways you can use your blog to support your Google ranking efforts.

• Blogs are a type of content-management system (CMS). They make the publishing process incredibly easy. You simply write up your post and click the publish button. And voila, your new article now appears live on the site. You can use this simplicity to your advantage when practicing SEO for Google. Remember what we discussed earlier, in the content section, about publishing new content on a regular basis? Blogging is a great way to do it!
• A blog can help you increase your content volume over time. If you publish a new post five days a week, you'll have around 260 pages at the end of a year. If you fill those pages with high-quality and keyword-rich content, your search engine traffic will rise considerably.
• This is all beneficial from a link-building perspective as well. If you provide truly unique and useful information through your blog, all of those new pages are bound to attract links over time. We talked about the SEO benefits of these links earlier. They translate into higher Google rankings over time.
• Be sure to interlink between related blog posts. This will keep people on your website longer, in addition to helping search engines crawl through the site. Here's an easy and logical way to do it. At the end of each article / blog posts, suggest three more articles the reader might find interesting. Set them off in a colored box with a bold title that says, "Here are three more articles you'll enjoy."
• Create a publishing schedule for yourself, and stick to it as much as possible. This will keep readers coming back, because they'll know when to expect new content. It also keeps the search engines coming back more often, which improves your visibility. And it adds to the growing volume of content that will serve you so well in the long run.

I love blogging. It's a great way to improve your SEO for Google, and it can be a lot of fun at the same time. That's why I've set up a separate forum dedicated to this topic. If you have any questions about it, be sure to post them in the forum.

Using Social Media

You'll get a lot more out of your search engine optimization program if you leverage the power and reach of social media. In this context, I'm talking about social-networking websites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. In this section, you will learn how to use these tools to support your Google SEO campaign.

• We've talked about the core fundamentals of a search engine optimization campaign. Much of it revolves around (A) creating useful content, and (B) promoting that content to a specific audience. Over time this will help you attract more visitors, acquire more links, and boost your rankings in Google and other search engines. Social media can help you achieve these goals by extending your reach.
• Social-networking websites allow you to reach a large audience with minimal effort. Granted, when you first start using these websites, you won't have many fans or followers. But this will change over time, as people begin to connect with you through the social networks.
• If you haven't done so already, you should create a Facebook and Twitter account for your business. Facebook allows you to connect and exchange information with a large number of people online. Twitter allows you to send updates to a large group of "followers," with the click of a button. You can probably already see how these tools can help with SEO for Google. Among other things, they can help you promote the content you've worked so hard to create.
• Spend some time learning the etiquette of social-networking websites, before you jump in. People do not like to be hit with a hard sales pitch on these sites. You can use them to showcase your content. But you should do it in a subtle and non-promotional way. Entire books have been written on how to use social networks for business and marketing purposes. Amazon.com has dozens of them. I recommend reading at least one of these books.
• You can also use social media websites to generate leads and sales. Many retailers have discovered how to do this already. They "leak" information about a sale or a limited-time offer to a large group of readers, and they instantly see a boost in sales.
• Social networking helps you stay connected with people who can help your business in some way, either by becoming customers or by increasing exposure for your business. It can also support your Google SEO program by helping you promote content and attract links from other sites.

The Google SEO guide is a work in progress. I update this page on a regular basis with new ideas, techniques and lessons learned. So you might want to bookmark it for future reference. I hope you have found this information useful, and I look forward to seeing you in the forums.

Have Questions About SEO for Google?

Do you have questions about search engine optimization for Google? If so, be sure to visit the forum section of our website. You can post any questions you have on the subject of Internet marketing. I'll do my best to help you. You have to register first, before you can post your questions. But it's totally free to join. There's no catch -- just plenty of good advice on SEO. I hope to see you there!