What Does Google Like To See?

The most basic question any website owner that focuses on SEO has one question: What does Google like to see on my website? If you don’t know what Google is looking for, everything you do will be a shot in the dark. Here is a quick overview of what Google and the other search engines want to see on your website.

The first thing Google wants to see is that your website is easy for their Bots to navigate through. Google Bots are software used by Google to collect information from websites and index them so they can be found in the search engines. If a website isn’t indexed, then it can’t be shown in their Search Engine results. Therefore, you want to do all you can to help the Google Bots maneuver through your site easily, so every page is found. Take for example Ezinearticles.com; it is not an overly complex site, and it’s search engine friendly. By limiting flash, video intros, and broken links on your home page and throughout your site, you can allow the Google bots to move through your site easily to find every page. The best thing you can do to help a search engine sift through your site is by adding a link to your Site Map on your home page; the Site Map is solely for the use of the Search Engine, as this tells the Bots where to look to find certain things. To create your own site Google Site map, go to xml-sitemaps.com. This is a great tool to use if you don’t already have a site map.

After you have made your site easy to navigate through, Google has to be able to find it in the first place so it can be indexed. The way to do this is by getting backlinks to your website. Backlinks are incoming links to a web page from any website to yours. There are many ways you can get backlinks to your site: Registering with search directories, submitting to web directories, ask friends, family and employees, asking websites you do business with for them, submitting Press Releases to PR sites, content syndication (submitting to article directories), submitting to social bookmarking sites, and many other ways. By getting multiple sites to link to yours, overtime Google and other search engines will find you and your site. After Google has found you website, it doesn’t want you to stop going after backlinks: the more backlinks a website has, and the higher quality the link is (i.e. is it the only link on the page, does the page have a high Page Rank, is it at the top of the page), the better Google will rank it and the higher Page Rank your page will receive. Page Rank is
Google’s system of rankings pages in organic searches, and can be calculated through an algorithm. Since your website wants traffic (people coming to your site), pursuing more backlinks causes your rankings to be higher, and the higher your rankings the more visitors you receive. This means that backlinks are essential for any SEO campaign.

Google absolutely loves original content. The slogan is as follows: “Content is King”. This is the reason you find so many blog sites, article directories, and libraries in all kinds of sites. Go to any website with a high Page Rank, like for example CNN.com. CNN has a page rank of 10 (Wow! That’s the highest a Page Rank as you can get, and is extremely rare), mostly because of the fact that there is an endless number of pages on their site. Every day they add news posts, blog posts, and so many other ways for original content, and Google sees this and rewards them. You can create original content by researching different topics about the category of your website.  By researching different topics, issues, and problems with the different categories, you can write about them and create articles and blog posts. Note that when you do this you have to make sure you don’t plagiarize, as this can cause legal problems. One way to check for plagiarism is by using the online tool at copyscape.com. When creating content, you want articles to have 500+ words, and blog posts to have 250+ words. Blog posts can be shorter because you want to update them with new posts frequently, so creating 800 word posts every other day can be time consuming, and you can run out of things to write about very quickly.

You can use content creation to get backlinks (two birds with one stone!) in the form of content syndication. By giving out your content (i.e. articles) to different content syndication sites such as submitting Press Releases with backlinks in them or submitting articles to article directories with backlinks in them, you can create a bulk of backlinks.

Google also wants to see quality. Search engines like quality content that has correct grammar, no spelling errors, and read by many visitors that leave comments. You need to be able to create content that offers something to the reader, whether its tips, general information, or news excerpts (Press Releases).

Search Engines want to see that you did everything manually, such as submitting to directories, submitting articles, and commenting on blogs. If Google finds that any of this is being done by automated systems, it can hurt your rankings or drop them altogether. Google hates to see things like Link Farms, which are groups of websites that all link to every other site in the group. Link farms are created solely for search engine optimization purposes, and can cause problems if Google identifies them.

Lastly I bring up Google most of the time instead of just “search engines”, because Google is by far the leading search engine, and they don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon. Google controls more than 2/3 of all searches, so by targeting Google and keeping them happy, you can help your website receive more visits from search engines.