We get questions everyday as to the best way to get sites to rank in google for peoples target terms and keywords and we can of course advise on this, and we do on a regular basis
but i though maybe i should share the way I see google to help explain how he (google) works ... and yes he is a he , although he changes his mind like a woman does with regards to importance....
if you had just landed in the UK and needed to get to say a small sleepy town in cornwall , how would you get there ?
You would need a map wouldnt you or a sat nav ?
Google is the same,
He is not going to find your site if you dont let him know that its there, now the old fashioned way to achieve this is to "submit" your site , but there are easier ways
All it takes is one well placed link for google to realise that your site is there ...... once he knows its there you need to keep him interested in the same way that an author has to keep you interested and turning pages when he writes a best seller ...
You only need to remember that google reads like a human to achieve results rankings wise, whether these good rankings will convert to sales will depend upon the research you have done into your target market and keywords and phrases.
Many people think that rankings alone will produce sales but this isnt necessarily the way things work.
To me its like writing a good book for people to read, your site becomes that book, each page is relevant to your book, you dont suddenly insert a completely unrelated chapter inbetween chapters 7 and 8 as that isnt going to make sense and may alter the books readability do you ?
Neither do you change the title of that book once its been printed ....... nor do you decide to replace the content once its sold a 1000 copies in order to catch a different market .... but you may produce a spin off or a sequel ....
imagine what would happen if suddenly penguin books decided to take the content within the pages of a best seller ........ for instance Far from The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy , and replaced it with thomas the tank engine .....
It would make the book completely unsaleable , and therefore the title would no longer make sense and neither would the inside pages .....
people would pick up the book expecting a classic to be confronted by childrens stories ....
it becomes irrelevant people wont read it and neither will google ..... since the back cover synopsis (your main page keywords and meta tags and content) promises much and the actual book once opened delivers nothing ...
Google reads in the same way as a human does.
google follows links instead of turning pages ....... but the important bit here is that google will rate the relevance of those links to the content it links to ....
this includes links back from people on blogs ... comments etc , keeping on top of the comments on a blog to filter out the spam posts and irrelevant website links will help to limit the damage done by links back from completely irrelevant sites and user content.
In order to get your site ranking nicely you need to concentrate on writing that good book, relevant content is king ..... content that makes sense to read and isnt just a mass of links.
Use your content to direct google and your human readers around the site, this is possible within your retail store within descriptions and recommended products.
Once you have decided on the "angle" you are using to market your site I would advise against making changes initially , let the layout and links age a while, by all means add content but making constant changes to the initial layout especially categories and products unless you can manage to redirect them all is in my mind the wrong thing to do , it confuses people and google and results in dead ends and dead links , when listing products think carefully about product titles and category titles , if you have planned your site this won't need much thinking about as you will already know which market you are aiming for and will already have a fair idea what your titles and categories should be,
Google when it first finds your site will have a good forage around, it will come back to see what if anything you have added, and will decide wether it would like to continue looking in much the same way as a human does, if your site is hard to navigate and/or doesnt make sense it will give up reading in the same way you or i would when confronted with a hard to navigate site or a site that doesn't contain the content it expected to find in relation to links keywords and search phrases.
Think about the way you yourself would use google to find what you wanted to find, think about how your potential customers would use google to find what it was they wanted.
Google loves updated content, dislikes the overuse of keywords and spamfilled content, google loves relevancy it is afterall how it returns a list of sites compared to what you ask it to search for
Google rankings may fluctuate hugely with a brand new site, and google will take it's time to decide what searches your site is relevant to, it will take less time to decide wether you are relevant or not if you have planned and researched your search terms and leywords and have thought about the market you are aiming to capture with your site.
People in my mind are far too impatient to see sites rank highly on google, and place far too much importance on their rankings rather than spend time working to improve their site and the customer experience, and their relationship with the buying public, In this day and age with the upturn in people trading online you need to make your site stand out and be remembered and this doesnt wholly rely on google rankings does it ?
It depends on a whole range of things
Price
Reputation
Communication
Design
People will not always buy based on price, they will make a decision based on several factors all at once .....
One thing you can almost guarantee though is that if the traffic you are getting doesnt wish to buy your product in the first place, then nothing will MAKE them ...... thats the beauty of ending up with unfocussed traffic through not researching how your potential buyers behave.
Now i realise that the above post is a bit ranty and a little disjointed but its quitehard to describe how google works without getting into technicalities and algorythms .... hopefully i managed to give a bit of an insight to those of you who arent familiar with the technical terms and stuff
Rain
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