What Is Google Optimization?

Most people active in digital marketing have heard of search engine optimization [SEO] and everybody knows that Google is the most popular search engine in the world, but even though effective search engine optimization is practically synonymous with ranking on Google, marketing professionals want to give the impression they’re casting the widest net possible to build rank and web traffic from all sources. But the reality is that Google matters – you can’t pretend it’s just another plank in your strategy. Strategic internet marketing firm GILL Media decided to tackle this head on by developing specific Google optimization strategies. These work with most modern search engines, but they’re designed to take specific advantage of Google’s trends and technologies.

Will the following three aspects of Google optimization harm your site’s performance on Yahoo! and Bing? No – search engines have too much in common for that now. Still, you’ll get the best response in your site’s Google rankings by working on the following:

Fresh Content: Google’s 2009 "caffeine" update considerably improved the strength of freshness in ranking factors. Recent content used to be more of a "tie breaker," but now it’s a strong positive factor in raw rankings. Furthermore, now that Google has integrated real time search along with various time sensitive search criteria, users may bypass your conventional Google ranking in favor of the most recent results of the last week, day or even hour. That means you need social media optimization that provides fast, frequent content if you want to maintain a presence in searches related to your target keywords – but if you do, your site may jump ahead of more established counterparts in real time search.

Keyword Semantics: Google’s semantic processing is still unsurpassed in conventional search engines. In plain terms, that means Google is capable of flexibly interpreting what the user wants through keyword searches like a person, instead of a too-literal algorithm. This is necessary because, among other reasons, a large proportion of searches are unique – nobody’s ever looked using that keyword phrase before. Thus, a search "in the ballpark" of your keywords [but not exactly hitting them] may still cause your site to show up in rankings. Google isn’t as smart as a human [yet] however, and you need to provide signals showing it what your keywords mean. That means repeating your keywords in several variations and linking it to leading terms for your site’s topic [product, service, etc.] so that Google can understand what your site means.

Load Times: Google hates slow sites, and has seriously emphasized this through to 2010, even creating an alternative protocol to http [the protocol that recognizes web pages] called "spd" to stimulate discussion about how to make the Web faster. You can’t set up sites using alternative protocols, but you can "cut the fate" out of existing websites by removing redundant coding, keeping scripting to a minimum, using graphics that are no larger than their intended display size [using resizing as site code to shrink overly large images usually slows things down considerable] and maintaining relatively valid code. You don’t have to dot every "I" and cross every "t" to get your code up to snuff. Google’s homepage had validation errors as recently as late 2009, but they weren’t bad enough to slow it down.

These are just three of the Google optimization factors GILL Media’s team has discovered. Aspects related to Meta data, flash, nofollow tags and more are part of the company’s overall strategy. Nevertheless, these three elements are an excellent way to start optimizing for any search engine – but making Google your number one target.

By: Chris Gill

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GILL Media provides Google optimization and other digital marketing services for businesses of all sizes, specializing in SMB digital marketing services.