How Does Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about helping search engines and users discover your content. When building your website, create it with your users in mind, aiming to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to its index. You usually don’t need to do anything except publish your site on the web. The vast majority of sites listed in our results are found and added automatically.
How Long Until I See Impact in Search Results?
Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google’s end. Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months. In general, you likely want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects on Google Search results. Keep in mind that not all changes you make to your website will result in a noticeable impact on search results. If you’re not satisfied with your results and your business strategies allow it, try iterating with the changes and see if they make a difference.
Help Google Find Your Content
Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it has already crawled. In many cases, these are other websites that are linking to your pages. Other sites linking to you is something that happens naturally over time, and you can also encourage people to discover your content by promoting your site. You could also submit a sitemap, which is a file that contains all the URLs on your site that you care about. It might be important for you to opt out your site as a whole or sections of it from appearing in search results. Google supports various ways that let you opt out of crawling and indexing of your URLs. While ads are a part of the internet and are meant to be seen by users, don’t let them become overly distracting or prevent your users from reading your content.
- Organize Your Site
- Use Descriptive URLs
- Reduce Duplicate Content
- Avoid Distracting Advertisements
- Write Good Link Text
- Control Your Snippets
Make Your Site Interesting & Useful
When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. Don’t drop everything and start reorganizing your site right now though. while these suggestions can be helpful long term (especially if you’re working on a larger website), search engines will likely understand your pages as they are right now, regardless of how your site is organized. Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs, so users can also use the URLs to understand whether a result will be useful for them. Google learns breadcrumbs automatically based on the words in the URL, but you can also influence them with structured data if you like a technical challenge. Try to include words in the URL that may be useful for users. Having duplicate content on your site is not a violation , but it can be a bad user experience and search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don’t even care about. Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide. While “compelling and useful content” can mean different things to different people, content like this generally shares some common attributes, such as:
- Easy to Read: Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
- Unique Content: When you’re writing new content, don’t copy others’ content in part or in its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don’t just rehash what others already published.
- Up-to-Date: Check in on previously published content and update it as needed, or even delete it if it’s not relevant anymore.
- People-First: Be sure that you’re writing content that your readers will find helpful and reliable. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help people understand your articles’ expertise.
Expect Your Readers’ Search Terms
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and writing with your readers in mind could produce positive effects on how your site performs in search results. However, don’t worry if you don’t anticipate every variation of how someone might seek your content. Google’s language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries, even if you don’t explicitly use the exact terms in them.
Link to Relevant Resources
Links are a great way to connect your users and search engines to other parts of your site, or relevant pages on other sites. In fact, the vast majority of the new pages Google finds every day are through links, making links a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results. Additionally, links can also add value by connecting users (and Google) to another resource that corroborates what you’re writing about.
Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to. With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what your linked pages contain before they visit.
Links can provide more context on a topic, both for users and search engines, which may help demonstrate your knowledge on a topic. However when you’re linking to pages outside of your control, for example content on other sites, make sure you trust the resource you’re linking to.
Influence Your Title Links
The title link is the headline part of the search result and it can help people decide which search result to click. This title text can also be used for the title that’s shown in browsers and bookmarks. You can influence the title links in Search by writing good titles: a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurately describes the contents of the page. For example, your title could include the name of your website or business, other bits of important information like the physical location of the business, and maybe some information about what the particular page has to offer for users.
A search result typically has a description of the target page to help users decide whether they should click the search result. This is called a snippet. The snippet is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag, which is typically a succinct, one- or two-sentence summary of the page. A good meta description is short, unique to one particular page, and includes the most relevant points of the page.
Optimize Site Images
Many people search visually, and images can be how people find your website for the first time. As you add images to your site, make sure that people and search engines can find and understand them. When you use high quality images, you give users enough context and detail to decide which image best matches what they were looking for. Use images that are sharp and clear, and place them near text that’s relevant to the image. The text that’s near images can help Google better understand what the image is about and what it means in context to your page. lt text is a short, but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and the context of how your image relates to your page, so writing good alt text is quite important. This helps Google and users associate the image with text that provides more context to what the page is about. If your website includes pages that are primarily about individual videos, people may also be able to discover your site through video results in Google Search. Many of the best practices for images and text also apply to videos:
- Create high-quality video content, and embed the video on a standalone page, near text that’s relevant to that video.
- Write descriptive text in the titles and description fields of a video (the title of a video is still a title, and so you can apply the best practices for writing titles here too).
Promote Your Website
Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines. You can do this in many ways:
- Social Media Promotion
- Community Engagement
- Advertisement
- Word of Mouth