Your Website’s Search Engine Results Page Ranking – How the Big “G” Decides It

Before I begin, I must make this proclamation: Google is the King of the internet scene, and we are all under its mercy. With more than 235 million searches/day, and Google claiming up to 48% of the daily web traffic (according to Alexa), it’s pretty obvious who’s the 300-pound gorilla dominating the internet landscape.

However, what’s not so apparent is the way Big “G” decides our website’s search engine results placement (SERP). Although we know that Google’s algorithm is made of complex set of rules and instructions – to calculate a website’s eventual SERP, dictates which websites stay on the 1st page, and which gets tossed into oblivion, we do not know exactly HOW Google does it.

Of course, you can spend months, even years, experimenting with different settings in your website to come up with a rough idea on Google’s algorithm.

Or you can read on about the key SERP factors I’ll be sharing with you, proposed by veteran internet marketers and verified by the internet marketing community.

Key Factors that Affects Your SERP

1. Backlinks

Backlinks are simply links that are directed back to your website. Every link that’s referred to your website gives you a certain amount of “authority” in Google’s eyes – you can equate one backlink as one “vote” towards your website. Just like in any election, the website with the most number of “votes” will potentially be the “authority website” of that particular niche, making it the leader of a particular field or niche.

2. Anchor Texts

A close relative of backlinks, anchor texts are simply the keyword(s) that you use for a hyperlink back to your website. I cannot stress this any further: you must use keywords in anchor texts that are relevant to your website. Here’s an example – if you’re targeting the keywords “bedside table lamps”, you should use something relevant such as “Tiffany bedside lamps” as anchor text

3. Keyword-Optimized Title and Description

Think about this – what’s stopping you from thinking that a box of cereals are actually something else altogether if it doesn’t say “Cereals” outside? This is the same thing with keyword-optimized page titles and descriptions – to let Google know what your website and pages are about, you must include the keywords you’re targeting in your title and page description.

4.  Content

In my hunt for SEO excellence, I’ve stumbled across this terms umpteen times: Content is King. Although we all know that the true monarch of the internet scene is Google, we can’t deny the importance of content in our websites. Content doesn’t just refer to articles alone – pictures, videos, FAQs and even your sidebars are part of a website’s content. It is vital that you make your website’s content keyword rich – for articles, you should ideally have keywords in the title, first sentence and last sentence of your article.

Now, you might be wondering why I did not include the age and Page Rank of a website in these factors. Don’t start slamming me as an incompetent web marketer because of this – I personally feel that Page Rank and the age of a website is out of our circle of control, and what we should focus on instead are the factors that we have clout over, such as content and backlinks. Why worry about the things that we have absolutely no control over when we can change other factors that are equally important in deciding our websites’ SERP?

Article authored by Paul – the SEO manager of ServerPoint, a web hosting company that offers cPanel dedicated servers and cPanel VPS hosting.