Getting Found in Google and How Google Sees You
You probably already get the basic concept that Google (or any
other search engine) crawls the internet and stores every web page it
finds in its index like a library catalog. To search for something,
you type in a word or phrase, and Google sorts through its collection
of pages and keywords and shows you its search engine results pages
(SERPs). If you have a business, with a website and you want
customers to find you, you want to be a part of this!
Getting on the list is simple, but getting a good spot on the list
takes a little understanding of how Google's brain thinks.
Have you ever wondered how or why Website X appears at the top of
the list while Website B is way out on page 10, even though its name
is an exact match to what you typed in? Google's measure of
“relevance” to what you searched for based on page title and
keywords within the page is actually only the little half of its
sorting process.
Google measures the “authority” of a web page using its own
trademarked algorithm called Pagerank, named after one of Google's
founders, Larry Page. Based on a project at Stanford University to
determine the credibility/importance of an academic document by how
many other papers make reference to that document, Google's Pagerank
determines how “important” a webpage is by how many other
webpages link to it. The more links your site gets, like getting
“votes”, the higher you'll rate in Pagerank. AND, if you get a
link from a high-ranking (“important”) site, your rank will jump
even more!
Ok, now how or where do you start? Make your website something
they'll want to come check out, create interesting content that
they'll want to see, and tell others about. Google crawls all of your
pages individually, not just your site, so make each page count.
You're not going to make the top of the list overnight, so the sooner
you get started, the better.
That's the game (the abridged version) you have to play if you
want your business to be found by any of the billions of consumers
that are on Google every day; and the kicker is, if you're not
playing, you're sending them to your competition who is.