Our 5 favorite parts of Google’s New Inside Search Interactive Website

A look into “How Search Works” by Google. Image courtesy Google.

Last week were able to take a stroll through Google’s graphic tutorial “How Search Works,” a part of the very recently revamped Inside Search part of the Google website. By the time you reach the end of that interactive pathway, you’ll find that you’ve learned a lot and that the once seemingly complicated concept of algorithms and search is now much more easy to understand. We think this is a great addition to the industry, especially in terms of increasing transparency for small businesses, and here are a few of our favorite parts:

Content: the basic element of Google SEO

In Google’s explainer, the first element they mention is content. When Google web crawlers–and any other search engine’s–sort through pages, they have algorithms that look for the highest quality content. While the idea of high quality content can seem subjective, we’ve been able to nail down some pretty good indicators over the past 12 months since the major introduction of these latest algorithms. SEO is content-based the way physical life is carbon-based: content is the fundamental building block of the online world, and without it, you’re digital marketing is sure to go nowhere.

PageRank is only one small SEO factor

Do you keep telling yourself that SEO is all about what your Google PageRank is? In Part 2 of the tutorial, we’re walked through some of the criteria that Google uses to rank websites, and the first algorithmic aspect they mention is PageRank. (This is named after Larry Page, one of the Google co-founders, by the way: a bit of internet trivia!) One basic building block for determining PageRank is inbound links. You can think of high quality inbound links as votes of confidence in your site. However, Google insists the truth is that your online marketing will go much farther if you don’t get too compulsive about PageRank, and instead just produce content that will delight your users to produce inbound links “naturally.”

SEO depends on freshness

Once again, this mention of freshness brings us back to the crucial business of blogging. By having a blog or a section with a constant flow of new content on your website, you’ll provide search engine crawlers with reason to notice your website’s domain again and again. Search algorithms are specially written so that fresh results rank higher than “stale” ones, and Google continues to improve its crawlers’ ability to distinguish fresh from stale. For example, a post from a year ago that is still valuable and actively viewed and commented upon will even be rated much better than a junk “filler” post written 3 months ago with no interest or social “movement.” This is where high quality can really show through for search engines.

Adding content on social media pages or providing tools on your website to easily share content socially–a mandatory aspect for each one of our projects–will naturally encourage people to share, and they’ll do your work for you as they generate links which get shared, retweeted, “liked,” and so on. Google’s crawlers look for new conversations, and you can get those started by adding great content to your blog.

Beware of SEO experts peddling spam

In its  exploration of spam in part 3, Google reminds us that its crawlers know how to recognize bad practices, such as link-buying, copied content, keyword stuffing, and in general poorly produced content marked by spelling errors, poor sentences, little social movement and more. It’s important to make sure that when you hire a professional to help you with SEO, you’re not inadvertently working with one who thinks they can essentially outwit Google.

Due to the lack of professional standards within the industry and the global nature of shady SEO firms, the best way to judge expertise is to review their work and note the presence or lack of quality. Do they talk about creating a collection of high-quality content, or do they talk about “tricks”? It’s a good idea to stay away from the tricksters, as what they pull could possibly damage your standing in search results or even get your site removed from search results altogether. BWD provides extensive SEO services, and we not only deplore these practices, but thoroughly explain them to our clients as well.

Image courtesy Google.

Appealing images and media will result in more traffic!

The last thing we love about this interactive Google explainer is the part they aren’t explicit explaining, but instead showing viewers. By leading us outside of our instinctive expectation that the online world is still made up of “pages,” Google has created a new and visually compelling scroll of information. There’s something almost irresistible in the visual graphic of a path to follow: our human minds light up with these connections and even regard them as playful. Almost like following the bright yellow line like Dorothy on the road to Oz. Visual innovation and high-quality professional graphics are one of the crucial elements to making your site a place users will enjoy lingering in, and are sure to share with their friends and colleagues, just as we’ve done here!

Need some assistance or production for your own SEO campaigns? Give us a ring and our team will get started with you right away.