Mastering how to build websites and pages that rank well in Google’s search results has resulted in a whole new discipline being born known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short. Back in the internet’s infancy, people would make websites without much of a style guide or care for proper formatting, but over time people have favored websites with intuitive design, relevant content to their searches, as well as websites that are trustworthy.
These changes have been reflected in how Google chooses what content to display to its users and what it chooses to avoid. While Google primarily does all of its crawling and indexing with robots, the search engine company is at the end of the day looking to provide real people with the kind of content they’d like to see. They have access to a dizzying amount of information, and can easily filter out websites that have “beat” the robots to gain ranking power. Understanding Google’s vision and how they work to rank sites is what keeps businesses like KnP Net Media going.
So, what is the human desire behind the robotic action of sorting through and ranking websites done by search engines like Google? Well, nobody except Google themselves know all of them, but a few of them are well-known:
Finding Sites People Like Spending Time On
Those who wish to rank well in the search engines and stay there need to know more than the magic keywords and site architecture required to rank sufficiently. Google tends to test domains in their search results before they can fully earn their place among the top 10 domains that come up for a particular search.
During this test, Google looks to see how long users spend on a particular site before leaving. If during the test all of the people who clicked a certain link left the website within ten seconds of it loading, there’s a high chance that the particular web page either isn’t what those people are searching for when it comes to that keyword or that the site/its content is no good.
Think of Google like someone controlling foot traffic, if they send people one way to get the corner store but everybody comes right back and asks for directions again, they aren’t going to suggest people go down that road since clearly nobody was satisfied with that establishment.
Finding Sites People Like
People create websites every day following one of thousands of get rich quick schemes currently available on the market. A majority of these websites aren’t made by people passionate about the topic they cover, they’re purely profit driven.
This is usually reflected in their content, the content published is extremely low-effort and there is very little substance, in fact it is most likely just an aggregation of the information in top five most similar websites smushed together to make some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a read. When people like content, they tend to share it among friends by way of either sharing the link or by promoting it on social media. Content that is talked about organically by real people fares much better than hastily written content meant to just give off the impression that the author cares.
Final Words
Remember, Google simply uses robots to best service their real flesh and blood users, so as much as SEO is about optimizing your website for web crawlers, it is also about optimizing your website for users. Sites that people tend to run away from or not spend lots of time on sends off red flags in Google’s system and those websites stop ranking.
Make sure to practice a good mixture of practices meant to make sure Google as well as human beings can easily crawl and read your website.
