Search engine optimisation (SEO) is all about courting favour with Google and to attract the attention of the most powerful search engine in Australasia you need to do a few things.
Like any self-respecting entity you need to use your manners, bring flowers, chocolates and make helpful gestures like opening doors. Essentially Google wants you to show it some love.
No seriously, it is an analogy, but just like every lover in history Google is fickle and changes its mind about what is important rather often.
At the moment Google is big on chocolates (aren’t we all). If you follow my ‘dating analogy through the pointers below you’ll see that chocolate translates as rich or interactive content.
Google used to love words and textual content as a sign that your site was useful and had interesting information for searchers. But as the internet has evolved and people’s needs changed, so has SEO. Adapting to the audience has mean that Google love images and content as well now and has found a way to prioritise the kind of images people want to find.
So to satisfy both your audience and Google, you should be looking at ways to improve the interactivity of your website. As long as you properly optimise the data behind images and video linked to your site its SEO rankings will improve. Adding the ability for readers to share or pin the images or video will also help your site as Google can recognise the social quotient of sharing and ranks anything that is popular or shared, linked or pinned to often highly.
Optimising the data behind your images and video can be a bit of a process but once done it is a permanent perpetual benefit. We will help you out with tips and tricks to maximise Pins, You Tube and rich content in our next instalment.
So, learn to love Google’s changeable ways, and make a resolution woo it as you would a potential lover this year. Google and by extension readers will fall in love with your site and you’ll never be short of a date or reader again, and your search engine optimisation will improve too!
To find out what Google wants to see when you come knocking, read on:
Manners
Manners on the internet translates as great meta title tags. Make sure you call everything by its correct name and title files and pages with as much detail as possible, just as would address someone by their correct name.
Hint: Check your meta title tag using this tool to see if your page’s title is the maximum length.
Flowers
Bringing flowers along on a first date wins you brownie points. Things like quantity and quality also count in this analogy. Each stem is a signal of your affection and the more exotic and rare the flower, the more valued the gift. Google feels the same about links so make sure you bring a bundle of quality links to your site.
Chocolates
All popular search engines, like people, love a little bit of charm and sweetness. Make Google smile with some sweet content when you turn up at its doorstep. Because readers want to see images and videos that other people have shared (the eternal popularity of cat videos is the ‘sweet’ chocolate theory in action) Google will rank things that people are sharing highly. It is also important to optimise the data behind your image and video files – its title, description, alt text (see the next issue for more detail).
Opening doors
Well opening doors for people is just polite isn’t it and as my Mum always says, good manners will get you a long way – a long way up the Google rankings too.
You can be helpful to Google by doing two things, making sure your website is secure and that it is user friendly for people searching on mobile devices.
Find you of your site is secure or optimised for mobile by checking the URL. If it is hosted on a secure server your URL will start with ‘https’ and if not it will just start ‘http’.
Mobile optimised or mobile reactive sites will have a designation ‘m.https’ or ‘m.http’. Talk to your webmaster or a web developer if you want to find out more about improving the user experience for your website.
Google loves secure and mobile optimised sites for the same reasons customers do – is safer and easier to read. With a secure site you know there won’t be any hacking issues.
Make buying your product or reading about your service easier for a customer and help improve the ranking for your site at the same time by making it secure and optimised for mobile devices.
So to catch the eye of Google’s bots and ensure they stay enamoured with your website follow our helpful tips and remember to sweeten the deal with rich content. Make your content engaging and interactive, all wrapped up in one ‘infotainment’ package, and most important of all remember to optimise these files.
Stay tuned for more optimisation insights. In our next post we will be giving you the low down on how to optimise images and videos.
Whether it’s for your website, or You Tube, we can help you get your content in front of the right audience, stand out from the crowd, and attract the views and likes that will help boost your Google ranking.