Keeping up with Google’s Constant Changes and Their
Influence on Search Engine Optimization.
SEO: Moving Your Site to the Top of the List.
In today’s Internet-driven world, very few things are more important to businesses, than good search engine optimization. The same applies to non-profits, schools, and other organizations that want their voices heard.
Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of taking all the necessary steps to insure that your website is highly ranked in the search results on various search engines. A website with great search engine optimization, or ‘SEO’, will appear within the first page or two of search results on Google, and other search engines, whenever anyone types in a keyword related to your site.
Websites are optimized for search engines by the way they are designed, with special emphasis on links, key words, and content. The choice of links to and from your site play a large role. This includes the names of the links, the associated key words, the quality of the links, and the amount of links. For instance, the more websites that point to your site, the more important your site appears to the world, and the higher it will appear on search engine results.
Why you need a specialist:
Let’s face it: things in IT change at the speed of light. Search engines are no exception. Over the past seven years, SEO has grown into a vast and highly complex process with many technical aspects. However, all of this complexity need not worry the business owner. A good web design/development firm with search engine optimization specialists on board can manage it all for you. They do the work, you relax.
The Encyclopedia of Small Business (2007), clearly states: “The small business intent on maximizing its exposure should engage an experienced Web page design firm. Such organizations typically have the know-how to structure the Web page appropriately and also to guide the owner on additional steps to take.” Of course the same also applies to larger businesses as well.
Google's many changes:
Google changes so often that most businesses need a team of web designers and developers to continually manage their website, insuring your business stays ahead of the SEO curve. Since Google is by far the most widely used search engine, its performance is of utmost importance to any business.
In 2007, Google began producing personalized results. This meant that if someone searched for certain keywords, the results would be filtered according to that person’s previous search behavior. Such a change could have positive or negative effects on the search results, depending on the situation. One negative effect is that it may limit the choice and breath of results that appear, and/or place sites that are the most relevant to a particular query way down on the list because those sites were not inline with the user’s previous search patterns. This could limit the visibility of pertinent information or result in poorer choices than a non-personalized search. However, according to Erik Dafforn at Search Engine Watch, this change in Google’s practices will most likely have little impact on most businesses.
More recently, Google made some changes to the nofollow attribute. Created in 2005, ‘nofollow’ is an attribute used with the HTML tag for links. Its original purpose was to prevent web crawlers from following links that untrustworthy sites made to your site. For more information on how this works, follow this very trustworthy link.
Soon, however, people working in SEO began using the no follow attribute to identify paid links on their client’s websites. They also began using a technique called ‘page rank sculpting’. This meant using the 'nofollow' attribute on links from one page on their own site to another page on the same site, allowing the destination page to be ranked lower. Then, that difference would be distributed among the other pages on that same site. Website owners could manipulate how different pages on the same site were ranked. The recent change by Google now prevents the nofollow attribute from being used in this manner. However, it still performs its original duties.
This long-winded drivel about all things technical is simply to show that SEO is a complex and constantly changing field. Changes in Google and other search engines complicate the matter further. However, using a web design and development firm, with SEO specialists on board, can allow your website to navigate these changes and use them to the best advantage of your company. Then your website will be the most effective marketing tool it can be.