From the course: Advanced SEO: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

Optimization from the perspective of Google

From the course: Advanced SEO: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

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Optimization from the perspective of Google

- [Narrator] We spend a lot of time, in the SEO world, talking about Google. In fact, this entire course focuses on Google. So before we look at their prospective on optimization, I want to explain why Google is at the center. As it stands today, Google controls 65% of the search market in the US. So right away, we can see Google has a tremendous lead on the competition. And, with SEO being a complex endeavor, it's preferable to invest energy into gaining traction with the market leader. Additionally, most improvements made specifically for Google tend to have a similar effect on other search engines. And the technologies for marking up your site, aren't going to be exclusive to Google. So you're still improving your visibility in other search engines, such as Bing, while you work towards these various improvements. Optimizing for Google, is a smart strategy for most scenarios. And that's why we invest our time and energy here. So then, what's Google's take on optimization? To get to that answer, let's start by understanding Google's motives. Google wants to provide you the quickest possible way to get you the answers that you're looking for. The faster they do this, and the better the results, the more likely you are to return and continue using them for searches. The more you return, the more ads you'll interact with and the more money they'll make. But Google also believes that simplicity is supreme. If you notice their search result page is fairly uncluttered. The ads are minimal, and the information is presented in varying formats depending on what is most useful to you right then. They generally believe that simplicity is key. So, Google believes faster is better and simple is better. So it's safe to draw a conclusion, that if Google believes this to be true at their core, then those values will spread throughout the organization, and all the way into the teams that manage search. So we can expect that Google will favor sites that are fast and simple. Now if only getting your site to be fast and simple was that easy. It's a multi-faceted process which we'll go through together. But, let's not get too in the details just yet. So, beyond fast and simple, Google also values the following in a website: accessibility, experience, context, transparency, and authenticity and accuracy. So accessibility, your site should be available across all modern devices and usable regardless of any end user disabilities. As for experience, the site needs to be extremely user friendly, and you really have to organize it around what the user wants and what they're looking for, not the search engine. As for context, you need to have links to relevant content, both on and off your site. Your content needs to be filled with context so you can't just keyword stuff, you have to talk about topics in a way that allows the user to really understand what you're talking about. And you also need to have links pointing to you, from around the web. As far as transparency, I mean this is avoiding any sneaky tricks or gray areas. Show Google the same website as you show your users. And finally authenticity and accuracy, your site needs to speak from an authentic place and it needs to be accurate and truthful. Keep these themes in mind and as we dig into the specifics of each optimization strategy because they play an important role in every decision, whether it's setting up title tags, or architecting redirects. Now you can actually over-tune the technical aspect of your site. If you forget the core values of what you're trying to achieve, you'll be working to build a website that's only great for a crawler and not great for a user. And incidentally, if it's not great for the user, well your rank will still suffer despite being finely tuned for that crawler.

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