Two in a Room Studios

Here’s a quick rundown on how Google creates it’s search index and why you may take a while to appear in the results.

Please note there are two kinds of results, “organic” or natural search results and “Pay-per-Click” or “AdWords” ads. Organic listings appear in the large left hand column in Google automatically over time. AdWords results appear on the right hand side and sometimes in the first 2 positions above the organic results, marked as “Sponsored Links”. The art of appearing in the Organic results is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The latter is referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

First we will focus on Organic Results.

Google uses programs (often called “crawlers”, “bots”, “spiders” etc) to search for sites on the internet to index, and then present as search results for visitors to their search engine users.
When the Google Bot finds your site it indexes your content, and determines what keywords (search terms) it should show your site for.

It is also important to realise that you do not “show up” on Google like a traditional directory system such as the Yellow Pages, you need to think of it in terms of “what search terms do I appear on Google for?” You need to think like your prospective customers and determine what they are searching for, so you can ensure you have the best possible chance to show up for those search terms.

For example if your company is called “ACME Industries”, your website is www.acme.com, and you sell “Blue Widgets” you could appear in Google search results for all those terms, on different pages, depending on the amount of other pages that exist with those keywords.

The way Google determines all this is one of the biggest marketing secrets of all time, but after extensive analysis of search terms and results for those terms, most experts agree on these basic rules (in no particular order of importance).

Quality of in-bound links
Google finds websites by links from other sites. If good quality, authoritative sites link to you it will greatly enhance your search listing profile – for the words in the text that links to you.

To further the example above;
A great link text would be “Buy Blue Widgets Online“, whereas “Click Here to buy Blue Widgets” would be a poorly constructed link.

As you have little control over who choose to link to you it can be very difficult to generate these links. The best approach is to have good quality information (content) that is “link-worthy” so people link to you by their own volition.

Reciprocal links eg “link to my site and I’ll link to yours” are not very highly regarded by Google, but are better than no links at all. Avoid “spam ridden” link farms and poor quality directories also as they are a waste of time. Paying for links is also considered bad practice by Google and could get you penalised in the search results.

Age of the Domain
Google prevents people spamming the search results by determining how old your domain name is. It can often take 6-12 month for your domain to be considered old enough by Google to include in the search results. There is nothing that you can do about this other than wait it out or pay for some AdWords (see below).

Frequency of Keywords
If you can have your keywords appear in your domain name, page title, and meta description (see below – anatomy of a Google Search Result) it will help you rank for that search term. You also need to ensure the keywords appear in the content of your site, but do not overdo it as the end result is for human beings to be able to read your site! Google does not use the meta keywords section of a page anymore. Over use of keywords (keyword stuffing) will also get you penalised in the Google search results.

Anatomy of a Google Search Result

(1) Blue Widgets
(2) We’ve been hunting for blue widgets and found some interesting links along the way …
(3) bluewidgets.com/ – 5k – Cached – Similar pages

Line (1) is the link to the search result page and is derived from the page title.
Line (2) is the “snippet” most often derived from the meta description. You can usually change this with your content management system or web editing software.
Line (3) the url or web address of the actual page.

AdWords, or Pay-per-click Ads
If you need instant results I recommend you use Google AdWords. You cannot pay to enter the organic search results but you can bid on keywords through Google AdWords to appear on the right hand side of the search results, and even in the first two places above the organic results.

The process if somewhat complicated to explain, but the easiest way is to work out a budget you can spend on AdWords per month and work to gain the best number of clicks from that total.

Two in a Room Studios offer highly affordable AdWords campaigns, which we setup in tandem with Google Analytics to give you detailed web statistics.