It’s easy to state that top SEO services include the state-of-the-art practices like creating back links, good quality content, not leaving a footprint, complying with Google’s requirements and all that.
But there’s so much more to good SEO.
For one thing, we need to get into much more than just what gets done during the SEO process. We need to explore the WHY of SEO — why does a business want SEO to be done on his website?
And don’t say “to get pages to land top 10 in Google search results.” because that still dodges the REAL reason you SEO your web pages.
The real reason we SEO
The real reason we optimise our web pages is to get more customers!
Nothing more, nothing less. You SEO your web pages to get more customers.
Having clearly explained WHY you SEO your web pages, now you will find out what gets done in a top SEO business to get your web pages to land top 10 in Google search results.
Content is King
If you want your web page to land top 10 in search results, you have to make Google love your web pages. To find out how to do that, we first need to clearly understand Google, and how it operates.
It’s no secret how Google makes it’s money, and yet most people don’t give it a second’s thought. And the crew at Google don’t shout it from the rooftops, eiother.
Fact is, even though it makes around $35 billion every year, Google only sells one thing: advertising. I know, you hear news about all sorts of wow-geewhiz innovative gimgaws – failed ideas that carry the Google brand, but the numbers don’t lie — in 2011, 98% of Google’s income came from advertising. It’s just one big ad agency!
How Google’s ads work
And Google’s ads only work IF THEIR SEARCH RESULTS ARE ACCURATE! Remember that, and you’re three-quarters of the way there, when it comes to SEO.
Any business making so much money selling such a limited range of products, only one product, gets very prickly if it thinks people are trying to rip it off. Yes, Google gets really dirty if it thinks you are trying to trick it into giving your web pages a better search engine ranking than they deserve.
And the last thing you ever want to do is to piss Google off. Get the Big G angry, and you’re gone for all money. No web pages in search results, therefore no customers, no business, you’re history.
And yet there’s no reason to upset Google, no matter how how precarious is their business model. The secret to pleasing Google is this: give Google what it wants.
What does Google want?
Google wants whatever page someone reaches after they click its search result to be the absolute be-all ducks nuts, one-stop shop for them. Get that right and you’re so well on your way to getting your page number one in Google!
How to get it right
- Set out your information as if it was a study course, or like sections in a text book. Break up each section into say four chapters — one for each keyword — and write an article for each one of them.
- Make each article at least 1000 words of blindingly brilliant copy, giving the punters a full wrap up of everything which can be said around the article’s keyword. But don’t use the article keyword more that once. If it’s a search term not usually used in conversation, don’t use it all, eg campervan hire Melbourne is a very well searched keyword, but not usually appearing in general conversation.
- Round it off with images, a video or two, and use meaningful sub headings to break it all down so it’s not a great big slab of text
- Make a link out of the page to a non-competitive website on the subject like perhaps Wikipedia, and another to the next article in your “course.”
Now let’s take a look at how this all works. Once you have all your article content set up just like Google wants it, you will be rewarded with slowly higher and higher search results rankings.
It’s just like the Loreal shampoo ad: “it won’t happen overnight, but it WILL happen.”
How does Google know?
Google has many ways of checking up on your hard work. In no particular order, here are the important ones:
- they have tens of thousands of humans all around the world who do nothing but check websites out to make sure they’re genuinely enhancing the web visitors’ experience. They check up on sites randomly, so there’s no pattern, no way you can ever know if your site is next, or if it already passed or failed last week.
- A few years ago, Google bought the world’s leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) company. Not long after that, Google’s little bots that visit your website every week or so had gained the ability to “read” your web pages like a human.
- Google made special algorithms to see if you truly know what you’re talking about. They now had the ability to identify your main keyword, and could then check if your article contained other words which matched your keyword.
They called these words LSI keywords. LSI keywords work like this: if you write an article around the keyword “carpet” Google now expects to also see words like underlay, pile, wool, Berber, shampoo etc in the article.
And this little algorithm is incredibly smart. If you write an article about grills, Google can tell whether you’re talking about barbecues or automobiles.
How Hard Does All This Make SEO?
Does all this mean it’s incredibly difficult to get your web page ranked in Google? No it doesn’t.
Does it mean you can’t get away with slapping a few hundred words together on a page and pounding the whole mess with few thousand back links? Yes it does.
Here’s the surefire method of checking whether your web page deserves to land Top 10 in Google
- Close your eyes and imagine you are someone who is earnestly seeking info about the keyword you’ve written your page about.
- Now read your page.
- Then ask yourself, if you were seeking info about that keyword, would you be delighted to have landed on that page? Would you be totally rapt and even grateful that Google led you to this website?
- If you clicked around the site, would you be even more delighted to have found it? Would you happily bookmark it for future reference?
- And finally, is there any information available, from anywhere at all, that you’ve left out?
Get all this right, and your destiny is to dwell in the house of the top 10 of Google forever!