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This week I’ve shared some resources for search engine optimisation (SEO) and I hope you’ve found the PDFs and videos useful.
At a high-level, SEO isn’t as complicated as many people would have you believe. Today I’m going to tell you how it works — in simple terms, so non-techies can understand!
In fact there are only 2 major factors at play (content + authority) and I’ll explain more about them further down.
But first, let’s take a look at Bluewire’s dismal early SEO years (…to see if you can relate.!?) and also to show you how we turned it around.
Excerpt from Chapter 12 of our book Web Marketing That Works:
“In 2008 we were unfindable on Google. We told ourselves it didn’t matter because word-of-mouth referrals were the best way to attract more customers. We told ourselves that our strong email list was better. It wasn’t growing quickly, but it was about 2,000 people.
To be honest, we just didn’t understand how Google worked. So we focused on other things that we knew better. That all changed when we Googled ‘web design Brisbane’ and couldn’t find Bluewire Media in the results. Not just on page 1, or page 2. We clicked through the first 10 pages, and saw nothing but tumbleweeds … and competitors.
If, as the saying goes, ‘You are what Google says you are’, we were nothing. We were embarrassed. Embarrassed that we couldn’t be found, and that we didn’t know what to do about it.
So we decided to turn it around.
HOW…?
We worked out what Google wants.
While little is known about the specifics of the Google algorithm, we do know Google is specifically looking for two things:
- Content that matches what the searcher is looking for.
Your website must be relevant to the search word or phrase. Obviously, if someone is searching for ‘financial advice’, then your website will need to include those two words. Otherwise Google won’t know what your website is about.
Of course there are hundreds of thousands of other finance websites out there too. To outrank them, your site needs more than just the search term ‘financial advice’. It has to have ‘authority’.
- Evidence of how much authority you have.
The most authoritative and relevant web page in any given field ranks first on Google.
The next most authoritative and relevant ranks second — and so on down the list.
The most important factor contributing to Google’s assessment of your authority is the quality of the links pointing to your website.
These are called backlinks.
In Google’s eyes, every backlink is a vote of confidence, an indication that your website is credible and useful. Links are the currency of the web, but did you notice we said ‘quality’ rather than quantity? A backlink from a very important site is worth more than hundreds from low-quality sites.”
