Optimizing your website for Google and other search algorithms

Ever wonder where Google gets its search results? Here’s how it works:

They guess.

Google tries to automatically find every webpage in the world and present the most relevant pages in its search results.

The first rule of SEO: make yourself easy to find.

By looking at these sample search results, we see that for every website, Google displays the same “template” of information. This template includes:

1. A webpage title.
2. A page description or excerpt.
3. The webpage’s URL.
4. Supplemental info such as date of last update, number of authors on a forum thread, etc.

The Current Google Template (06/01/2009):

Google's Default Template as of June 1st, 2009

This means that your website needs title tags, meta description tags, easy to understand urls (static or dynamic), and (for best results) newly published text, images, videos, or other media on a regular basis.

Google is going to make a guess about your website no matter what, but they are biased toward trustworthy websites. (This is because they want to have trustworthy search results for Googlers.) If your site is ‘what you see is what you get’, Google considers it trustworthy.

This is the second rule of SEO:

WYSIWYG
(follow the Google Template)

Websites that give users ‘expected’ results (i.e. a hyperlink takes them where they think it will take them or info-rich, easy to scan descriptions) are more usable, more trustworthy, and so more likely to be at the top of Google’s results.

A good SEO helps you choose what info Google will display in its default template when it finds your website to draw you the most traffic appropriate to your stated goals. Google guesses, unless you tell them otherwise – and you can tell them otherwise! The easiest way is with Google’s webmaster central toolkit.