SEO & You
So I was pointed to a Facebook wall post the other day regarding SEO.
It went along the lines of:
I’m in Google heaven today. I’ve just done a search for “[KEYWORDS HERE]” 55,200 websites indexed with that search term and I OWN page 1. I’ve got 5 listings for [MY WEBSITE]. And I didn’t spend anything on SEO!!! (I couldn’t fit them all in the screen grab!)
The Screengrab looked something like this:
above picture is an amazingly dodgy photoshop representation of the search in question.
There are several reasons why this is false representation of the Google organic search ranking for the site in question.
Let me list them for you here:
- Never trust Googles organic search rankings on a computer that’s being frequently used to visit personal websites. The reason behind this is Google tracks your usage of the internet and picks sites based on things you frequently visit and keywords you frequently search, ESPECIALLY if you’re signed in with a Google account. They basically target you for things you’re interested in.
- Also note that there was an update for Google that prioritises search based on social media interactions on Google+, hence the little avatar coming up on the search results. Basically, because you shared it - you must like it - so it’s #1 in search for the keywords you entered.
- Another thing to recognise in the above search is the quotations around “web development sydney”. This is very much different to: web development sydney. The quotations force Google to search the string as whole as opposed to each word separately.
I thought i would write this up to help provide guidence to people who are interested in their website and search rankings in the organic site listings on Google. It’s important that SEO goes beyond content on your site, there is site structure as well as historic site data that is to be taken into account as well.
Also a few more little SEO tips:
- A LOT of people are misunderstood here. YOUR PAGERANK IS DIFFERENT TO ORGANIC SEARCH RANKING.
- If you’re getting SEO from someone who can’t explain the above to you, then I suggest looking elsewhere.
- If the SEO person working on your site doesn’t have any pages of their own, or another clients ranked highly on Google, why are you using them?
If you’re after guidance with your SEO - then don’t hesitate to contact me.
