Over the next few weeks and months, small business owners and marketers will see lots of new advice about search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization, you might recall, is the blanket description for things you do to make it easier for people to find your website when they use search engines like Google or Bing. It also describes the things you do to convince Google or Bing to show your website when people search for the services or products you offer.
Google has secret rules (algorithms) that it follows to determine which websites to show when you conduct a search.
That secrecy has spawned an entire industry of digital marketers – including me – who specialize in advising website owners how to appear at or near the top of Google’s search results pages. Much of that advice is based on experimentation and educated guesses.
The Google curtain has lifted, a little
Why will we see lots of new advice?
Near the end of May, a few ingredients in Google’s secret sauce became public. Some search marketers say this is the SEO story of the decade. You might have seen a news headline or two referring to a "leak" of information. It’s just as likely that the release was an accident.
Important: This information does NOT tell us how Google weighs the many factors it considers when determining how to rank a website.
However, it DOES give us a look at some of the factors it considers.
More like a list of ingredients
If you think of Google’s rules and algorithms as a giant cookbook, then information released in May is an index of potential ingredients for any of the recipes. But there’s no information about how much garlic to put in a marinara sauce or how much lime juice to use when baking a key lime pie.
Here’s an example from the code that was released
This tiny section of the document is related to anchor links, which are links that take site visitors to another section of the same page. This code tells us that Google does, or did at one time, track the age of anchor links on websites. It doesn’t tell us whether new anchor links are important, just that Google is capable of tracking that information.
Note: I’m not anywhere near an expert in interpreting the code in these documents. I’m relying on information I’ve read elsewhere to help me – and you – understand what all this means. I’ll link to some of those sources below.
How does this affect you?
What does all of this mean, especially for small businesses and solopreneurs?
Take everything Google tells us about search optimization with a big grain of salt. It’s clear from the released documents (which Google has verified as authentic), that Google is good at obfuscating the truth about how it ranks sites. For example, it has repeatedly denied that it uses a page rank score to evaluate sites, but the documents indicate otherwise.
It’s clear that fresh, updated content is important. Sites that have not updated existing content or added new content will lose ground in search results.
For years, search optimization practitioners have worked at optimizing each page of a website. The document suggests that Google also looks at sitewide factors, such as whether page titles fit the overall theme of the site.
Speaking of page titles (an element in your website code, not necessarily the headline that people see on the page itself), many of us who practice SEO have followed a "rule of thumb" that titles should be somewhere between 60 and 70 characters. It looks like that might not be accurate, at least in terms of where a site ranks.
I’m avoiding diving too deeply into the technical weeds with this. I don’t want your eyes to glaze over while reading about APIs, GitHub, toxic backlinks, etc. And I only want to write about what I understand myself.
I’m sure the information in the released Google document will change some of the things I do to help clients with search optimization. And I’m just as sure there will be lots more advice coming as experts take the time to study the code.
Where to learn more
If you want to read more about the released Google documents, here are some links to articles by SEO and digital marketing experts I follow:
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The next newsletter arrives June 18. Between now and then, mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day invasion on June 6; World Caring Day on June 7; and Flag Day on June 14. Remember your dad on Father’s Day, June 16. Until next time, be grateful. Be generous. Be patient. Love.
Thanks for spending some of your time with me, . I appreciate you.
Mark
P.S. - This newsletter was 100 percent created by me, a human.
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