Yesterday I started talking about how Google works.  If you’re a business owner, and you treat your website as an important source of new business leads, then I think it’s critical to understand the Google machine.  Just a little bit of time spent understanding the way Google works can really help the average business owner drive their website project forward in an informed way.

At it’s core Google is incredibly simple to understand, and at the same time massively complex and hidden by a veil of secrecy.  Google aren’t too keen to share their secrets as it will make it too easy for everyone to game the system and get a good search ranking when they don’t deserve it.

That being said, there are some simple pieces of knowledge every business owner with a website should understand.

First and foremost, Google is a reputation engine.  The reason why Google won the battle for search engine supremacy way back in the 90’s is because of the way Google identified web pages with a great reputation.

The original Google algorithm was based on an idea that’s been at the core of every academic’s life for decades.  Funding for academic research flows to those academics with the best reputation, the most influence, the greatest reach.  How is this judged?  Simple, the more times an academic’s work is referenced by other influential researchers the better they score.

Website reputation, influence and ultimately PageRank (Google’s measure of influence) is based on the quality of what’s written on the page, and how many links the page has from other influential sources.

Now of course, it’s not really THAT simple, there are hundreds of factors that affect how a page will rank in Google, such as: page speed; how well the code is written; how it’s linked on social media.

But at it’s core, Google wants everyone to write about the thing they care about, write it well and get lots of good sites to link to you.  So write great content about your business, what you do, how you do it and who you do it for, then get other great sites to link to you.  

As they say: Simples.

If you don’t think it’s that simple and would like someone to hold your hand, that’s what we’re here for.  So why not give us a call and we’d be happy to talk to you about your business or charity, what you goals are, and how the web can help deliver those goals.