Making friends with
Google for fun and profit

If you’ve spent much time reading about driving traffic to your website, you’ve probably come across references to the "Google algorithm". If you’re not a technical person, this may have been accompanied by a feeling of mild panic. "What’s an algorithm? Sounds scary," you say, "I’m not an engineer. I have no idea what to do about this!" Take a deep breath—it’s not as bad as it sounds. Today we’re going to explain everything you need to know about Google’s algorithm, and give you some practical tips to bring back to your website.

What is an algorithm anyway?

"Algorithm" is just a fancy word for the set of instructions that make up a computer program. An algorithm powers your email, an algorithm powers your GPS navigation, and an algorithm at Google decides what sites to return for every question that you type into that search bar. So basically for our purposes here the Google algorithm is just another name for Google search. 
    Another term you may have come across is "SEO", which stands for "Search Engine Optimization". I like to think of SEO as basically just "making Google happy". If you want people to search for a certain topic on Google, say, "hair salons in Los Angeles", and find your website in the results for that search, you have to do a few things to make Google happy.

Making Google happy

The basics of SEO come down to this: good content, a good website, and getting links to (and to a lesser extent from) your site. From there however, the specific strategies can get pretty detailed. Here are a couple pointers to get you started.

Mobile matters

Last month we talked about why it’s important to your site’s visitors to be able to use your site easily on mobile devices. It turns out that, as in many cases, what makes your visitors happy also makes Google happy. Starting on April 21, 2015, an event dubbed 'Mobilegeddon', Google drastically increased the importance of mobile friendliness in how it ranks websites. To see how mobile friendly Google thinks your page is, try their Mobile-Friendly test.

Faster pages keep Google happy

Another factor in the happiness of your site visitors is how quickly your pages load. If pages take too long, people leave. This is already bad for your business because of lost conversions, but it turns out that it makes Google unhappy as well. You know by now that if we want good search engine ranking, we want to keep Google happy. To see if Google thinks you could do more to speed up your site, try their PageSpeed Insights tool.

Need help?

Hopefully now you’ve got a few ideas for how to better optimize your site for Google’s search algorithm, but if you need more help, contact us here at VES for a consultation. We’re well-versed in SEO and we can also help you make your site faster and more mobile-friendly.