Ethical SEO Not Spam According to Google
4 Ways to Gain SEO Favor With Google
Google’s Matt Cutts wants to dispel the myth that Google considers SEO to be spam. He outlines some basic SEO best practices and strategies for marketers to consider. Follow these guidelines and you’ll be better off than most.
Google’s search algorithm is also referred to as a bot (short for robot). The Google bot crawls your website. So, it stands to reason to maximize your website’s ability to be crawlable by Google. This includes using a search engine friendly content management system (CMS), keyword-centric URLs that correlate to the page’s content, a silo approach to content to make it easy for the Google bot to crawl, and of course, well written meta data. If this sounds like a lot of detail, it is. Just remember the goal is to make your website easy to crawl so Google will return it in search results for relevant keywords. Speaking of…..
A viable SEO strategy requires that you perform keyword research to identify the keywords used by your target audience. Your keyword research should be organized by relevant themes. Ideally, you should also do persona research to identify the personas of your target customer. Armed with these insights, your content should be written (or revised) to reflect the relevant keywords searched by the personas you identified. For example, if you sell a home product the person doing a Google search might be a female consumer, or it might be a male consumer. One might be the buyer and the other an influencer. Reaching each persona may require different keywords and different content pages on your website.
Google has made it clear they care very much about the experience you provide the user on your website. The layout and design of your website is a factor. Is your content well organized? Is all the content easy to find? Do you provide images, video, informational resources that help the user get valuable information? Do you provide social sharing of your website content? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you lose favor with the user and with the Google bots as they score the usability of your website.
If your website loads fast, Google considers that a contribution to a good user experience. You may need to clean up your website’s code to improve load speed, or change your hosting package, or switch CMS platforms. Consider the factors that may be slowing down your website and take appropriate action to increase load speed for good SEO ranking results.
Cooperate with Google
As Matt Cutts explains in this video, ethical SEO is merely the process of paying attention to these details in order to gain SEO favor with Google’s bots. So, just cooperate with Google and chances are you’ll get good SEO ranking results.