How Google Works
It is obvious that the higher Google rank you can achieve, the more traffic you will receive. And I mention Google because due to its huge market share it is really the only search engine to optimize for. The non-sponsored results down the middle of Google get 75% of the total clicks, and the sponsored results along the right (and sometimes top) of Google get 25% of the total clicks. Here is just how important the regular, non-sponsored rankings are:
- Rank 1 = 25% of clicks
- Rank 2 = 12% of clicks
- Rank 3 = 8% of clicks
- Rank 4-10 = 3-5% of clicks each
- Rank 10+ = 0-0.5%
So how does Google figure out what website to rank as number 1 or number 2? If you understand how Google works, you will understand the rest of these tips easily and naturally.
Google finds the best match for a search query by looking for words on sites that use the same words that the user typed into Google search. It looks for these words in a number of places on a blog post. We’ll cover all of these again later, but they are known as on-page factors that influence search engines:
- Page title
- Text on the page, especially bold, italicized, and underlined texts
- Domain name and URLs
- Alt tags for images
So a user searches for the phrase “Sacramento real estate” By using those same words on your page in the above locations, you’re telling Google “my post is about the same thing – the search user is looking for my website!” The above on-page factors account for about 25% of Google’s matching process.
You can rather easily craft your content to tell Google that your post matches what the user is looking for, but Google will believe you more if you have references (other websites) that also indicate a proper match. Therefore the majority of Google’s process looks at the links coming into your page from other websites. It concludes that if other websites found your page valuable enough to link to it, then it must be valuable for Google users as well. These are called off-page factors, and Google looks at:
- The number of websites linking to your site
- The Google PageRank and authority of the website linking to your site
- The anchor text used in the link linking to your website
