What really works to generate traffic from search engines?
First of all, it’s important to note that Google is responsible for most of the world’s search engine traffic (although there’s still some flux in the actual figures).
Search results
This may vary from one niche to another, but it’s likely that Google is the dominant player in the search results in which your company or website would like to appear. The best practices described in this guide will help position your site and its content in other search engines.
So no matter which search engine you use, search results are constantly changing.
How they rank websites
In particular, Google has updated a lot about how they rank websites through many different algorithms.
So many of the simplest and cheapest ways to rank your pages in search results have become extremely risky in recent years.
So what works? How does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people are searching for? How do you get all that valuable traffic to your site?
Google’s algorithm & SEO
Google’s algorithm
SEO
algorithm is extremely complex, and I’ll share a few links for anyone looking to delve deeper into how Google ranks sites at the end of this section, but at an extremely high level:
Google searches
pages containing relevant, high-quality information on the searcher’s query.
They determine relevance by “crawling” (or reading) the content of your website and assessing (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, primarily based on the keywords it contains.
They determine “quality” by a number of means, but among these, the number and quality of other websites linking to your page and your site as a whole are always important.
To put it very simply: if the only sites linking to your blue widget site are blogs that no one else on the Web links to, and my blue widget site gets links from trusted places it frequently links to, like CNN.commy site will be more reliable (and supposedly of better quality) than yours.
Increasingly, additional elements are weighed by the
Google algorithm
algorithm to determine where your site will rank, such as :
How do users interact with your site? Do they find the information they need and stay on your site, or do they return to the search page and click on another link?
Or do they simply ignore your ad in the search results and never click?
Your site’s loading speed and mobile-friendliness
How much unique content you have (versus low-value, very “thin” or duplicate content)
L’
Google algorithm
algorithm takes into account hundreds of ranking factors in response to searches, and they are constantly updating and refining their process.
