SEO SYDNEY

Query Engine

The query engine is the last of the three major search engine processes, and involves retrieving information from the index, applying various ranking factors to each, and presenting a list of results to the user, displayed from the most to the least relevant / trusted. The query engine attempts to understand the intent and context of a search query, and supply the best results. Factors like device type, user location, search history, and query intent are all taken into account by the query engine in order to ensure that information shown to the user is of a high quality, factually correct, and is as relevant as possible.

The Three Layers of a Holistic SEO Strategy

With a better understanding of how search engines work, we can now start talking about the three layers that make up a holistic SEO strategy, and how they align with search engine processes. This will allow you to better put all the piece of the SEO puzzle together.​​

Let’s talk about the three layers in the order Google reviews them:

Relevance

Once your content is crawled, the indexer needs to understand what the content is all about. This is where basic, old-school SEO 101 comes in, by having optimised tagging, a robust link matrix, a structured IA, well written on-topic content, et al.

​But if this all sounds too much like techno-babble, and you – as a small business owner – just want to focus your energies on something tangible, then my advice is to focus your efforts on adding brilliantly written, on-topic content to your site. As this is the number one most important SEO ranking factor in 2017. However don’t make the mistake of writing your web pages yourself just because you ‘know your product’ or because you wrote a few papers while at uni. SEO copywriting is an art-form best left to the trained professionals. Because there’s a bifurcation required when writing for the web. On the one hand you need to write content that Google will love. And on the other, you need to write content that humans will respond to. And there’s no better way to up the relevance of your website than by adding an endless supply of brilliantly written, on-topic content, that actually adds something to the discussion of the topic (rather than just regurgitating what others have said, or – worse! – just doing a blatant sale’s pitch and disguising it as ‘on-topic content’).

On-Page SEO v Off-Page SEO

On-Page SEO​

As its name suggests, on-page SEO refers to optimisation techniques that can be applied directly to your website, and of which you have total control. In addition to ensuring that all of your technical elements are correctly in place, there are a few other aspects that can help improve your on-page SEO. These include optimised meta tags and title tags, clean URL structures, correctly formatted content, internal and external linking, your website’s Information Architecture, and more.

​Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the tactics you employ away from your website, to boost your website’s trustworthiness (sometimes referred to as you site’s ‘Domain Authority’) in the eyes of the search engines. Common off-page techniques include link-building, social media optimisation (SMO), email marketing, local citations, press releases, etc.

Achieving an elusive combination of both on-page and off-page SEO will have the positive impact on your site’s ranking, visibility, and conversion rate.

Search Engine Market Share

Eight out of every ten people in the western world use Google to search for their information online. You know it, I know it, and your customers know it. If you’re searching online in China, Google is a bit-layer and you’d likely be heading over to Baidu, Qihoo360 or Sogou. If you’re searching online in Russia, then Yandex, Vkontakte or Odnoklassniki are likely to be your go-to search engines of choice. But for most English speaking countries (and certainly for all your potential customers in Australia), Google is far and away the only search engine that people use to find what your small business does, where you do it. Yahoo, for all its historical largess, is a spent force with just 5.55% of the market, (and is actually powered by a Bing back-end), and Bing gets a paltry 7.15% of the market (with most of that due to the fact that Bing is the default search engine installed with Windows 10).So for the purpose of this article let’s limit our discussion to ‘What You Need to Know About Google’s Algorithms’. Because as mentioned there are multiple search engines, each with thousands of algorithms powering them, so it’s easy to get lost in techno-babble and obfuscation when having a nerd-fueled discussion about them all. But if we just focus in on Google, and perform a taxonomy of Google’s algorithms weighted by direct relevance to the small business owner trying to eke out a living via gaining traffic to their website, we can better narrow down the algorithms small businesses to focus on.

Google’s Panda Algorithm Explained

An algorithm designed by (and named after) machine learning Google engineer, Navneet Panda, that can, for all intents and purposes, read a page of content on the web like a human being. Panda can tell great content from good, good content from bad. Originally released in February 2011, Panda knows if your writing is university level, high school level, middle school level, or Donald Trump level. Panda was designed to combat the plethora of low quality websites that were ranking in Google purely based on having lots of links pointing at them, rather than having brilliantly written original content that answered the users question. After numerous updates, Panda was absorbed into Google’s real-time core search algorithm in 2015.​​​

A website with a low Panda score will get penalised in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Positions). Panda takes into account the design of your website, it’s UX (or User Experience), et al. But it is 90% concerned with the words on the page (screen). Panda wants to know what written content is on your website, how well is it written, how well is it SEO’d, and how much knowledge is expressed both vertically and horizontally on the topics being discussed. While ‘Content is King’ is a truism in Google search that I’m sure you, as a small business owner, know already. It is imperative you realise that in the post-Panda world, not all content is created equal.

Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm Explained

Dodgy back-linking violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. So don’t try to cheat the system by buying or manufacturing links. Create brilliantly written, engaging content, and earn the links you get. That way the links you get will be the kind that Google loves. Google’s Hummingbird Algorithm Explained
An algorithm released in September 2013 that has been likened to the Google Caffeine algorithm of 2010 (which provided ‘50 percent fresher results’ and was in essence a turbo-charger strapped onto the Google search engine, to make indexing the web twice as fast). Hummingbird was originally created to ‘read between the lines of Google searches’ to better make sense of the actually question being asked, rather than just targeting the keywords being used. It also focused on giving better and more accurate ‘long tail results’ (a long tail search is a search that uses several keywords, not just one or two). Because, despite what you as a small business owner might think, 70% of all search is long tail (rather than just the short tail, or ‘Trophy Searches’, which is most small business websites try to target).

Hummingbird doesn’t come with a penalty; that’s not what it’s about. Hummingbird is about increasing the relevancy and quality of search results for users by better understanding the user’s intent. With Hummingbird, Google is better able to judge what a user is actually asking for, rather than by just taking the question on face value, or relying solely on keywords. For example, a small business owner in Sydney might type ‘SEO Sydney’ into Google, which is a keyword followed by another keyword. But they might also type ‘How do I get my small business website on the first page of Google?’. A search that doesn’t contain the keywords ‘SEO’ or ‘Sydney’. But with Hummingbird, Google knows that both searches (if they’re performed from an IP address in Sydney) are looking for the exact same thing. This is intelligent search at its best.