Read the following excerpt from my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ and discover how Google is the key for attracting visitors to your website…
For most small businesses these days, generating targeted traffic to your website is about three main things: Google, Google and Google.
That is:
1. Google organic listings;
2. Google Maps and Places; and
3. Google Adwords advertising.
Less than a decade ago, the word Google started to enter our everyday language. Firstly as the name of the new search engine everyone was talking about, and then as a verb (as in “google it”) which described a new way of finding information: anything from researching your family history to finding a local tradesman.
While Google makes most of its money from advertising, the positions in the main search results on the left hand side of the results pages cannot be purchased, and are determined by the engine’s proprietary formulas, or algorithm. This algorithm has become increasingly sophisticated at determining what is quality content and what isn’t. Tactics that try to trick the search engines into rankings which are not really justified by the quality of the website’s content are becoming more and more difficult to get away with.
However, by adhering to a number of well-established fundamentals it is possible to make the most of the content you do have and maximise your website’s opportunities to be found at the search engines.
So you may be asking yourself the question ‘why is Google so dominant?’ – Google’s dominance in the search engine game harks back to the turn of the century, when Google created a vastly superior search engine to its competitors and has managed to stay well ahead of the pack ever since. Up until 1998 when Google first came on the scene, the leading search engines of the day, like Alta Vista and Excite to name a couple, focused primarily on the keyword structure of pages to determine rankings. The problem with this approach was that it was highly vulnerable to being exploited by webmasters who, by trial and error, were able to figure out the keyword formulas needed for high rankings.
But what makes Google different than these other vulnerable search engines? The inventors of Google added another layer over the top of simply taking keywords into account. Their breakthrough was the way they used interlinking patterns within the internet to figure out which pages were the most important ones. Google’s PageRank algorithm regarded an incoming link to a web page as a “vote” for the importance of that page and the more votes a web page received, the higher up the rankings it would be listed.
This “vote via links” system became the dominant way that Google determined the best content for a particular keyword search. It was also much harder for webmasters to manipulate, and therefore was a much more reliable method for automatically returning the most relevant and important pages in the results.
To read more, you can purchase my book ‘The NZ Small Business Superhero’s Internet Marketing Handbook’ by clicking here.
