This is part two of my three part series on how to own the internet in your town!
Organic search:
Again, organic search results are the regular search results that come right underneath that 7-pack. They are also called the “free results,” but let me tell you, they’re not free! They take a heck of a lot of work, and it’s going to take more and more work in the future to stay in the organic results. There are two components to organic search, on-page factors and off-page factors.
Let’s talk about the on-page factors first. Google and Yahoo have these “things” that they call Bots that function somewhat robotically. A Google Bot, for example, will go and search for content on your website. It wants to find out what your website is about. It wants to see if your website is relevant enough to be featured when someone types some keyword, in the google search box. So, the Google Bot goes out and the very first thing it looks at is the content of your website.
Google has decided there are certain words that should be on the website of a chiropractor or chiropractic clinic. The Google Bot will look at the content and then at the title of your website. It will look at the address (the URL that you type into the www part of your website). It is going to look at your headings and the description of your website. It is going to look at your pages to see what’s on them, and it’s also going to “crawl” the text to find out what it’s about. In order to have the Google Bot think that your website is relevant and, therefore, worthy of being put up there in the search results, the on-page factors are one of the things it looks at. Therefore, you want to make sure you have good content on your pages. If you’re a chiropractor, you want to have good chiropractic headings and a lot of chiropractic terms. You want your web pages to match what the Google Bot and the Yahoo Bot think your website should be about. Again, these are on-page factors.
Off-page factors, on the other hand, are all about things that are not on your website, or are off your website. When we talk about off-page factors, we are talking about the “popularity” of your website, the “authority” of your website, and how your page ranks compared to other pages. Google and other search engines determine this by what sites are linking to your website. Which is to say, what links are coming into your website.
Let’s look at an example of a website that links back to another website. If you have a link on your website and it goes out to Super Supplements, you are giving Super Supplements what we call “link juice.” Super Supplements is benefiting from that link. If Super Supplements linked to your website, Super Supplements would be giving your website some “link juice.” So, the “backlinks” that are beneficial to you are the links coming into your website.
Backlinks are very important factors in Google’s decision whether or not to show you on that front page. Google will determine the quality of those links, where they are coming from, i.e., which website, and the total number of the links in order to decide how relevant your website is. Therefore, the more backlinks you have, and the more backlinks you have from “authority” websites, the better.
Another important off-page factor is domain age. The longer you have had a domain, the better. It makes your website more valid in Google’s eyes. Why would Google put up a brand new website on the first page when there’s a website that’s been around for 10 years? Google is looking at domain age as experience. Unfortunately, there’s not too much you can do about that. Either you have an older domain or you don’t. But, it is still an off-page factor that is considered.
Let’s tie it together. You have your on-page factors, i.e., website title, heading, pages, text. Then you have website #1, website #2, and website #3 all linking in to your website. These are the backlinks. These are the things that are going to give your website authority in the eyes of the Google Bot. Obviously, the more links you have coming in, and the quality of those links, the more relevant you are going to seem to Google. So, we want to develop a system to start creating backlinks and start having people link to us. One of the ways we do that by having great content on our website, the kind of content that people want to link to. Other ways are a topic for another post.