The Little thing about google that nobody talks about

For a particular search term there are over 23 million search results. My website comes up in the second position for a google search of this term. How did I achieve this? It is not that hard once you understand exactly what is going on You have to understand the intentions of the web surfer and how google craves this intention.

I get a lot of search engine newsletters and emails and I do a lot of searching the web for important news and information about google. It is the search engine to rank high in. There are no two ways about this. So understanding how to make google happy is critical to your success as a webmaster. If you can get a top ten ranking in google you are going to get traffic to your site! And it is going to be very targeted traffic which means that the visitors are very interested in what your site has to offer.

But in analyzing things myself I discovered a little thing about google that nobody seems to talk about.

First off Lets ask a question.

What is the most important thing to google?

Answer: Getting a searcher the exact thing they are looking for. In other words Google is trying to figure out the intentions of the searcher. What would make this searcher happy? What is his/her intention here?

Sounds pretty simple right? But now we need to take this a step further and ask: How do they figure out exactly what a searcher is looking for?

This is the real crux of the matter. How does google interact with a searcher to figure out what they want? Ahh... This is the important thing so read carefully :)

The Process by which google figures out what a person wants when they type a search word or phrase into the search engine.

1. A person types in a search phrase or word

2 google Displays a bunch of results then waits and watches

3. The surfer looks through the listings and reads the information for the listings then makes a decision and clicks on a site.

4. Google makes note of what site the surfer clicks on and then says "Hey something about this listing made it desirable for this search term".

5. Google keeps track of all the searches for the same term and keeps track of the websites that were clicked on.

6. Google makes adjustments in the listings. For example: When a certain keyword term is put in, nobody ever clicks on these listings, so I will move them down, they are not what the surfer intends. And, people clicked on these listings a lot so this is what is intended.

Now lets take a look at this in real life:

Let's say you go to google and type in "Epic Fantasy"

This is what you get as of Sep 19, 2006:

This shows the top 5 listings of 23,200,000 results. . So how did these sites make it to the top? Thats easy to figure out. Google displayed listings for a lot of sites that were relevant to "Epic Fantasy" and over time these sites are the ones that most fulfilled what the searcher wanted. Google knows this because these sites are the ones that people most clicked on. Google got the signal that these were what the searcher intended when he typed in "epic fantasy"

Now here is the important critical thing you have to understand about the google search listings.

The searcher looked at the listings and read the information and then decided from there which one was what he was looking for then clicked on it. And google noticed this. So lets look at this information. Here is a close up of the second listing:

Each website listing has three critical bits of information that a searcher looks at:

  1. The title of the page: This gives you a good idea as to what is on that page and if it is what you are looking for. In this case it is : :"The only epic fantasy website on the net"
  2. The plain text listing: This is the metaname description of the page. In this case it is: "the epic fantasy website for everything in the genre from books to movies and articles". Note: If a webpage has no meta description tag then google will print out the first line or two of text on the page.
  3. The url of the webpage: We look at this because it gives us clues to the website that this page is on. And it is very important. We all use this as an aid to figuring out if this page is what we want.

So now, What should you do to increase your ranking with google?

  1. Pick your keyword or keyword phrase and type it in google.
  2. Look at the listings and understand the critical information that is shown. Remember that these websites in the top listings are successful - they are giving the searcher what he wants.
  3. From this information write a synopsis of the intent of the keyword. From all these clues can you get a handle on what the searchers intention was?
  4. Create a content rich webpage that fulfills this need. Then make sure the title of the page and the description/or first few lines are attractive to this intention. Make sure they describe what the web page is about because that is what the searcher is looking for. If you can, get a url that also shows relevance to the keyword. If you cannot get a url for this or cannot afford it you should at least make sure the url of the page is relative. For an example of this: the first listing in google for epic fantasy has a url of: www.strangehorizons.com/ 2002/20020624/ epic _ fantasy .shtml
  5. Note of Warning: Don't try to just create a weak page with these three characteristics that are strong. Google is way too smart for this. Google looks at the whole page and assesses how strongly the page supports the big three displayed bits of information. If your page is weak it will never climb up the search listing. No tricks: Always create a content rich page with lots of information that fulfills what the searchers intent is. Go to the epic fantasy webpage to get a look at what I mean by this.

Does this work? Is this good advice?

Yes it does work! And the proof is that this listing we have been talking about; The one in the second position called "The only epic fantasy website on the net" is my website! So with this understanding of google and its desire to understand the intention of the web searcher I have managed to get my website to the second position out of over 20 million search results.


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