Why is Google algorithm so important?
Google is the top dog. The number one giant. The world’s most important search engine. Which is why everyone who has a website must appeal to it. Google sets the rules and we must obey. That’s how we come to the term you’ve probably heard before – SEO or Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a series of activities performed in order to improve the website’s ranking in the search engine results. And Google’s algorithms are the ones that decide whether your website will be on top of the results or it’s going to be buried 6 pages under.
In order to make Google like you and put you on the first page of results, you must follow some rules. Your content needs to be relevant, useful, interesting, your website easy to navigate, and people need to like it. Sounds easy? Well, competition is fierce and not everyone is playing by the rules. That’s why having an SEO agency on your side is a good idea.
How does Google work?
Google crawls the web using a code called a “spider”. This program follows links from one page to the next and then every page is copied and passed on to the servers. Google gathers information from a huge number of webpages and organizes it in the Search index. The algorithm searches the Web pages that contain specific keywords you searched and it assigns a rank to every page based on numerous different factors.
Instead of managing a huge database of every page and sorting through them every time you search for something, Google found a shortcut. They created an index that is being searched decreasing the time needed for the search. Certain words, known as stop words, are not being searched. Some of those include “and”, “the”, and “if”.
After the indexing process, comes the ranking. In all likelihood, Google will find thousands of results for your search meaning it has to find a way to serve you the most relevant ones first. If your SEO process was done well, your website will be among the first ones. Agencies such as ClickDo can work on your SEO strategy and greatly improve your ranking.
Google will check the URL and the backlinks. If you searched for something, let’s say “climate change,” Google will check whether there are words “climate” and “change” in the URL. Another thing it will do is look at the backlinks.
What Google is constantly looking at are four main things:
- Relevance
- Authority
- Trust
- Usability
So, the relevance of the content plays a major role in deciding where your website will end up in the search results or whether it will show up at all. The relevance is determined by both on-page and off-page factors.
When we talk about authority, we have to mention PageRank which we can explain through votes. Every link to a page is one vote and the more votes a link has, the better it will rank.
Trust means filtering out the spam. It makes artificially manipulating the search results more difficult. While on one side we have something called White Hat SEO, which is a term for using SEO in the right and fair way, there is also something called Black Hat SEO which refers to shortcuts and activities used in order to try and trick the Google algorithm into trusting you.
The last thing is usability. Things like great content, fewer ads, and fast loading will improve your ranking.