Everyone’s heard of Google and everyone knows that if you want your site to be seen, you need to appease the Google Gods. But do we really know what they do? And how they do it?
I mean we know all the buzz words. SEO. Keywords. Meta Data. Google Analytics. But how does Google work at its core? I’m going to break it down a little so you know how this search giant does its thing.
What Steps Does Google Take to Generate Results for your Webpage?
Google follows 3 main steps when getting your website ready for the search results page. Crawling, Indexing, and Serving – or Ranking. So let’s break down each step and then talk about what we can do to make sure our sites are set up properly.
What is Website Crawling?
The first thing Google needs to do is actually find your site. How else are they supposed to list it? It does this using something called “crawling” whereby it visits websites all over the internet in the form of an anonymous user and checks the data on them.
Google is constantly crawling the internet, looking for new pages that aren’t on its list. Sometimes it finds it via a link from a known page. Sometimes it’s found when the website owner submits a sitemap to Google for it to crawl. Or, if you’re using a website host like WordPress or Blogger, the host will submit to Google whenever you update a page.
Once Google finds your site, it will then crawl each page to find out what’s on it. It analyzes the text, images, links, videos, and a load of other characteristics to decide where it should appear in the search result page. See more about this below under Indexing.
What can I do to help Google crawl my site?
- The first thing you need to do is make sure your site looks right. Are your images broken? Are other elements of your page hidden? Use Google’s testing tool to see if your site adds up
- If you have updated a single page and you’d like Google to recrawl it, submit it. This submission will tell Google “hey, I’ve added a bunch of new keywords and things are much better than the last time you looked at it.” and Google will check it out. If you’ve done a bunch of changes, then use a sitemap.
- If you do ask Google to crawl a page, it’s best to use your home page. Then, make sure your home page has excellent navigation so that while Google is crawling it, it will find as many other pages as possible. In fact, if your site is small, then telling Google to crawl your home page is all you need. It’ll find the rest on its own.
What is Website Indexing?
Once Google finds your page, it needs to figure out what the whole thing’s about. It’ll catalogue images, embedded videos, keywords and phrases, links, and other important factors. It takes this and indexes it in the Google database.
How can I improve my Google Index?
- Focus on creating great page titles. They need to include the keywords you want to focus on. They need to be short. And they need to be easy to understand.
- Do the same thing with your page headings. Take this blog post as an example. I’ve used my H tags to showcase the important parts of this topic. These are the things I want Google to look at first when they crawl this post.
- Use text as much as possible. You may want to use images to convey your topics and while Google can understand them to an extent, it doesn’t do it as well as it can with text.
What is Google Serving and Ranking?
Google presents the most relevant answers to a question first. It can only do this based on the info it’s given and a few key factors that it finds out on its own. Things like the user’s location, native language, and the device they are using. Someone searching from California is going to get much different results than someone searching from Tokyo.
How can I get a higher rank in Google Search Results?
- Make sure your website loads quickly. Long-loading pages don’t do well when people have data caps on their phones. Optimise your images so they aren’t too big, disable any plugins you don’t need, and make sure it all looks good on mobile.
- Keep updating your site as more relevant information becomes available. In 5 years time, this article might need big adjustments if Google changes the way it crawls websites. If I kept it the same, then Google isn’t going to put it at the top of the results list.
- Make sure your site gives your users the best experience. Check Google’s own guidelines for tips on how to do this.
That pretty much sums it up. If you make sure Google can easily find your site, ensure your content is crawlable and easy to understand, and your content is relevant and high-quality, then you’ll have no issues showing up in Google’s search results. Sure, there’s so much more involved in Google’s brain. But this is a great starting point for those of you just starting out and trying to make sense of it all.
