SEO – What Really Matters to Google

Google continues to consolidate its position as the number 1 search engine and it is natural that we all want to achieve the highest rankings possible on it. But how?

In this month's Chaffey Column we asked eMarketing expert Dave Chaffey to explain "What optimisation techniques really matter to Google?

Google engineers have acknowledged there are hundreds of signals they use to rank a site in their listings for a particular search term. This can make Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) daunting for business owners who need to know which factors really matter.

If SEO is new to you, SEO involves achieving the highest position practical in the natural or organic listings on the search engine results pages after a specific combination of keywords or keyphrase has been typed in. In the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Live Search, the natural listings are on the left with the sponsored links or paid listings from Pay Per Click search marketing occurring to the right or alternatively, above or below the natural listings.

Fortunately we can simplify the important ranking factors into two:

1. Matching between the copy on the page to the keyphrase typed in (the main factors are the keyword density, keyword formatting, keywords in anchor text and page title tags).

2. Links into the page (inbound or backlinks). Google counts each link to a page from another page or another site as a vote for this page. So pages and sites with more links-in will be ranked more highly.

Looking in slightly more detail, some of the main factors in approximate order of importance are:

1. Frequency, position and emphasis in body copy. The number of times the key phrase is repeated in the text of the web page is a key factor in determining the SERPS position for a key phrase. Copy can be written to increase the number of times a word or phrase is used (technically, its key phrase density) and so boost position in the search engine.

2. Number of inbound or backlinks and internal link structure. Evaluation of inbound links to determine ranking is one of the key reasons Google became popular.

This factor known as Page Rank helps Google deliver relevant results since it counts each link from another site as a vote. However, not all votes are equal – Google gives greater weight to links from pages which themselves have high Page Rank and the link anchor text or adjacent text contains text relevant to the key phrase.

Since the Page Rank concept was introduced in Google in 1998 it has been extended to include other factors which assess the authority of a page for a particular theme and all major search players now use a variant of it.

Internal links are often forgotten, but the great thing about these is that you have more control over the anchor text, so can highlight particular words you are optimizing on. You should avoid using navigation based on images or Flash – plain text links work best.

3. Title HTML tag. The keywords in the title of a web page that appears at the top of a browser window are indicated in the HTML code by the <TITLE></TITLE> keyword.

This is significant in search engine listings since if a key phrase appears in a title it is more likely to be listed highly than if it is only in the body text of a page. It follows that each page on a site should have a specific title giving the name of a company and the product, service or offer featured on a page.

Greater weighting is given to key phrases at the left of the title tag and those with a higher keyphrase density. The Title HTML tag is also vital in search marketing since this is typically the text underlined within the search results page which forms a hyperlink through to your web site. If it is an effective call-to-action that demonstrates relevance you will receive more clicks which equals more visits and the search engine will determine that your content is relevant too.

A quick test of a site that has been optimised is to check the Title tag of the home page – if it is simply the company name, or ‘home’, then likely there has been no optimisation.

4. Meta-tags. Meta-tags are part of the HTML file, typed in by web page creators, which is read and displayed by the browser. They are effectively hidden from users, but are used by some search engines when robots or spiders compile their index. In the past, search engines assigned more relevance to a site containing key phrases in its meta tags than one that didn’t.

Search engine spamming of meta tags resulted in this being an inaccurate method of assessing relevance and Google has reported that it assigns no ranking relevance to meta tags. However, other search engines such as Yahoo! Search do assign some relevance to meta tags, so it is best practice to incorporate these and to change them for each page with distinct content. There are two important meta-tags which are specified at the top of an HTML page using the <meta name=”> HTML keyword:

i. The “keywords” meta-tag highlights the key topics covered on a web page.

Example: <meta name="keywords" content="book, books, shop, store, book shop, bookstore, publisher, bookshop, general, interest, departments,">

ii. The “description” meta tag denotes the information which will be displayed in the listing of web sites in the web browser when a web page is found.

Example: <meta name="description" content="The largest online book store in the world.">

Other meta-tags are used to give other information such as the type of tool used to create the web page. Remember that incorporating the names of competitors is now not only underhand, but case law in the UK has demonstrated it is illegal.

5. Hidden graphic text. A site that uses a lot of graphical material or plug-ins, is less likely to be listed highly. The only text on which the page will be indexed will be the <TITLE> keyword. To improve on this graphical images can have hidden text associated with them that is not seen by the user (unless graphical images are turned off), but will be indexed by the search engine. This is also required for accessibility compliance. For example, text about a company name and products can be assigned to a company logo using the ‘ALT’ or ‘title’ tag as follows:

<IMG NAME= ‘Logo’ SRC= ‘logo.gif’ ALT="Eastern Engineering – lathes and milling machines">

This factor is assigned lesser relevance than previously, but it is best practice to use this since it is also required by accessibility law (screen-readers used by the blind and visually impaired, read-out the ALT tags).

So these are the most important positive ranking factors, but remember that there Google also has negative factors of webspam filters in place where it can penalise unethical approaches such as buying links.

Further reading

Google has its own Guidelines for Webmasters which explain in reasonably plain language what your agency shouldn’t do. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=8522

If you want more detail, including a weighting on a scale of 1 to 5 of the factors that matter, see the SEOMoz rating of the most important 25 ranking factors rated on a scale of 1 to 5 by SEO experts: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

About the author
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for Marketing Insights , an independent digital marketing consultancy. He is the best selling author of several Internet Marketing Books used by digital marketing professionals and on many University and College Courses globally. His latest book, eMarketing eXcellence: Planning and Optimising Your Digital Marketing, written with PR Smith, was published in June 2008.