Pick me Google – How Google chose me!
My interest in how search engines choose websites to display them began in 1989, the year after Google was born. I was working for Ericsson as the general manager of Sony videoconferencing.
I knew the internet was destined to become more popular and easier to use. I spend $25,000 of those companies’ money building a beautiful looking website called virtual-travel. That is what websites cost back then, and it looked just great.
It had some information and our products were available…however after I finished putting the site together, I wasn’t sure how people were going to find it. After we publicized the launch we had a surge in traffic, but then it dropped off to nothing. I knew what a search engine was, and Google was (we thought) just another smaller one we sometimes used.
People back then still were not regularly going to the internet to find stuff they need…..along side of being creatures of habit, we just found it hard to use. In hindsight, websites back then were not so great and not so informative either.
It was just easier to grab the yellow pages or newspaper and call the business that was buying the biggest advertisement.
There wasn’t a search engine popular or successful enough to govern how websites should be; and reward them by showing them at the top of the search results. So the problem was at both ends…the users found it hard to get what they wanted, because it was actually very hard!
I remember wondering how to get the search engine to recognize my new website and rank it. I phoned the company we had spent all the money with, and they didn’t know….or wouldn’t tell me. So somehow I found out who were the biggest ‘website technical houses’ in Brisbane and asked them. Two more of these companies couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell me.
Until one smart chap said to me “yes I know, with Meta Tags”….I remember saying “ahhhhh…Meta Tags….. I love it!” He was quite right back then….that and a keyword stuffed domain name and Meta information, was about all there was to search algorithms. My fascination began!
What has changed for the consumer with the success of the internet….it is that it is no longer the company with a big print advertising budget that gets all the phone calls. The Google search algorithm delivers the company that has done the ‘hard road’…..the one that has been around the longest, provides the most organized information, and the one that other websites links to for information. Search delivers the company who has been developing and organizing their content to provide relative original information…..the authority in that industry or topic.
So what do internet marketers do? We replicate the natural process a website would normally take years, and do it in just a few months….or in a year or so. So to really understand how internet-search marketing works, you have to understand how it is naturally intended to work.
Of course Google is well aware of marketers and knows Search Engine Optimizers (known as SEO’s) are not going to go away….so they have to accommodate us and we have to oblige them. It is important when doing SEO to remember to make the process look natural. This is called ‘White Hat SEO….obliging Google. Then there is ‘Black Hat’ SEO; those that try to trick Google, and quite simply they will always eventually fail.
Google only employs geniuses to contribute to the algorithm, and they have plenty of them, all over the world. They are all continually revising and contributing to this algorithm; the world greatest and longest equation. It is updated about 10 times a week. So it is pointless to try to outsmart them.
So it comes down to the question – What can an internet marketer do to make my website look mature, informative, organized, and an authority in my industry in order to rank on Google front page?….follow me to search engine marketing to find out more!
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