Why is it so hard to rank well on Google?

I have recently been involved with a discussion about ranking on Google on LinkedIn, it has become more difficult to rank highly now, but why, these are my notes on it.

Any web marketer or somebody who owns a website realises (or should realise) the importance of high search engine rankings. Any webmaster who is serious about succeeding online should know that you need to be on the first page of Google results, but more importantly you need to be at positions 1, 2 or 3.

There was a time when achieving high search engine ranks was not really very difficult, all you had to do was create content, didn’t particularly need to be useful or of high quality, dump some keywords in it loads of times and *BANG* you were done and could with little effort rank highly.

Google changed a few its indicators around 2005, so with the same content you just had to throw some links in (predominately from link farms, article networks, blog networks and directories) and you ranked well.

From about 2007, things really started to get really difficult, and as every year marches forward Google just keep making the SEO role more and more difficult.

Today, there is a huge amount of competition out there in all markets. Achieving a page one rank in Google (and the rest of the search engines) has become extremely tough, unless of course you are working smart.

Working smart will often mean here the ability to choose the right set of tools – tools that can rocket your web visibility by taking your website from the lower ends of search engine results all the way to very top. See a previous post - Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review.

A page one rank is all you need to rocket your web traffic that will blow your mind, however, traffic is just one side of the coin and if you want to convert traffic then you need to look at Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), but that’s a completely different subject.

Anyway, the real reason why it’s more difficult to rank on Google is that they want to present the very best results to us searchers, and their tweaks and modifications to their algorithm is all just designed to ensure that the sites that are well liked, with the best content rise to the top – it’s that simple really.

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Internet Business Promoter (IBP) Axandra Software Review

I’ll say right from the start that the way that most SEO software products try to rank your webpages doesn’t work; sure they can help you decide which keywords to use and where they should go in your webpage, but other than that they really can’t push you to the top of Google.

 

I’ve been working in digital marketing for more years than I care to remember and to be honest with you; Internet Business Promoter, or IBP as it is popularly referred to, is the best thing for ranking since sliced bread!

 

Obviously it’s a good idea to analyse your pages to ensure that they are perfectly optimised for the given keyword(s), but unfortunately Google simply doesn’t work like that.

 

Google doesn’t care about your optimisation in silo, they want to know how good your site is against your competitions sites, it quickly works out which sites are worthy of being on the first page of their results; so it would make perfect sense to optimise against these top 10 results – and that’s exactly what IBP does.

 

Once you enter you primary keyword, IBP does a search (either on Google or your preferred search engine) for that term then analyses the top 10 sites to see where they have put their keywords, how many times, are they in bold, the title, description etc., and then it presents you with the results in an easy to follow report that is your roadmap for updating your page to be as good as these on the first page.

 

This on-page SEO analysis isn’t the end of it for IBP; it also looks at the inbound links so you know if there is room for improvement there too.

 

One of the great things about IBP is that it will never offer any advice that will be a short-cut to SEO success. It may take some time (as any SEO does), but if you follow its advice your website is more likely to succeed. But remember, just like life, there is no guarantee that it will actually work.

 

IBP is actually a suite of tools from Axandra. These tools allow you to do the following:

 

1. Research the most potent keywords in your niche/market
2. Optimise your website for these keyword(s)
3. Generate high quality back links for improving your Page Rank and rankings, and
4. Track the position of your website as it improves its search engine ranks.

So all in all it’s an excellent piece of software that I use in my professional role on a day to day basis, the only thing I would say is that you shouldn’t expect magical results, the software is excellent and keeps updating itself as Google releases changes to its algorithm, but even if your page(s) were exactly like pages in the top 10 with more links into it, there could still be indicators that Google looks at that could still put these sites above yours (i.e. design, architecture, bounce rate, times on site, previous penalties etc.)

 

But all in all, if you are serious about ranking well on Google then you need to invest in this software.

Download it for a FREE trial now.

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Stop asking ‘How’ Google rank websites and start asking ‘Why’.

Seriously, if you are interested in improving your ranking for your website then you must stop trying to guess what ingredients are in the Google ‘secret sauce’.

What makes up the Google algorithm takes up way too much thinking time, just accept the fact that Google pushes websites through their machinery and out pops the ranking for your site.

A better question to ask is “Why do Google rank sites the way that they do?”

From a users perspective Googles aim of is very simple; it wants to understand what information you want to see when you query its search engine and then it wants to ensure that it shows you the very best results.

Why is understanding this a better way to understand Google? 

For Google to do it's job properly it needs to ensure that:

1. It understand what your site is all about
2. When visitors get to it they engage with it (good time on site, low bounce rate etc)
3. They potentially share your content

This all means that you can stop focussing your precious time on tying to get others to link their sites to you, spamming forums and blogs with your links and stop tweaking META Tags and focus on the important area … your content.

With the right content Google will understand your pages and be able to determine whether you can satisfy a search query well.  So your content needs to be able to answer visitor’s questions, the content needs to be exactly what the visitor is expecting to see when they click on your link in the search results.

This means that you need to ensure that you answer the questions you think that the market has for your products and services – this might actually mean developing a formal FAQ section, but it also means ensuing that they easily understand what your website and pages are all about, and how exactly you can help them.

Seriously, understand what Google is trying to do and help them to help you, and you will start to rank well within Google. Period.

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Panda 4.0 and how to survive it

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SEO techniques you should NEVER try

We all make mistakes, but if you end up making a mistake of your SEO then it could really start to ruin your business.
Many businesses, including some top international companies, have fallen foul of Google Webmaster Guidelines and have been penalised by being removed from Google index.

Google has developed sophisticated algorithms to look out for websites and website owners that look like they are attempting game or beat Google at their own game. You can’t win.

Here are a couple of tips to ensure that it doesn't happen to you.

Keyword stuffing

OK, so you have worked out what keywords will bring visitors to your website; once you have this knowledge the temptation is to stuff these keywords all over your pages!

This is a definite violation of Google Guidelines and will result in getting you delisted from their index. Write your pages as if you were talking to someone about that product or service, use your keyword, but use then sparingly.


Automated comments

It doesn't take long searching the internet to find companies that are willing to sell you software that will enable you to leave comments automatically on blogs and forums – this can’t go wrong can it as we all know that Google loves to see links to your website.

Actually Google employs some very clever software that detects instances of when you attempt to leave lots of comments on blogs and forums, leaving lots of comments simply isn't natural behaviour. It’s fine to find forums and blogs that are related to your business and leave comments on them (in moderation), but do so with the understanding that your comments need to help a wider community, you need to add value to these sites, not just expect a link back to your site.


Paid links

Lots of high profile websites offer to sell links to other sites to help their ranking, and it can be very tempting to use these services as a quick win for ranking.

Google knows the sites that sell links and will penalise sites that they link to, also many of these site will again be unrelated to yours and so Google will see these links as unnatural (i.e. these sites wouldn't naturally link to yours).


Generic Directories

There are lots of internet directories that offer (either paid or free) to provide a link back to your website. As many of these directories are just pages of links to websites then Google again sees these as unnatural linkage and if you are found to have listings in lots of these directories then they are likely to take actions against your site.

Linking from directories that are dedicated to your market or location are better, as are using well known household name directories. These can be a useful way to gain traffic, but don’t reply on this tactic for ranking purposes.

Cloaking or Hidden Content

This is a technique that attempts to hide content from website visitors but is instead made available only for to search engines to see; again Google is now really clever at spotting these techniques.

All content should be available to your visitors, it should be informative; it should make sense and read well.


Doorway Pages

This isn't a technique that is used much today, but Doorway pages are pages that are again just written just for search engines and typically have content on them that is not able to be seen by website visitors. They are used to try to build a large amount of authority into a single page; these pages then automatically take visitors off to a completely different website.

Again, they tend to be stuffed with keywords, but once again it’s a technique that Google are very good at sniffing out.


In Summary

There isn't any way that you can beat Google and fool it into giving you better search engines rankings that your site deserve – always write pages with your visitor in mind.

Good quality, well written site will always (in time) rank better than poorly written, low quality ones.

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SEO: What to expect in 2014

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS!  We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

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Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context. 

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 

Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

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Panda and Penguin updates from Google

Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links.  Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

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