When it comes to the bottom line SEO is about making money. Making money by getting more eyeballs on a website, and therefore more sales, leads or ad revenue . SEO experts gain revenue by making it easier for customers to find websites through search engines like Google. The main problem is that true experts are few and far between, but many digital marketing companies sell dreams because the average business owner has no idea what SEO is or how it works. And search engine optimisation is about understanding how search engines work and that is very technical and, in some ways, hidden.
Search Engine Optimization in USA
The birth of SEO as an industry essentially happened in the United States and in the beginning ranking on Google was easy as their were many tricks that allowed people to game the system. Since then Google has become progressively smarter and wants to deliver the best search results to its users. But many people still believe in old practices that actually damage websites’ rankings and try to manipulate clients into paying for a service that doesn’t work.
A lot of those practices and attitudes have, of course, filtered over to Europe were we now see many SEO Firms employing outdated or shoddy SEO Strategies. In our opinion this only serves to damage the reputation of the industry in whole and make it that much harder for a genuine SEO agency, like ourselves, to attract good businesses that have been burned by tricksters in the past. Being based in Northern Ireland allows us to understand the unique challenges of Search Engine Optimization in Ireland to provide professional, ethical and proper methods of boosting page-views and sales for Irish online businesses.
What does Google Actually do?
But what does Google (and the other search engines like Bing and Yahoo) actually do? Search engines like Google collect all the information they possibly can about what’s happening online and run that information through algorithms to decide which websites appear in a list, when someone searches for something.
One of the most important things they watch are links. The links you click that take you somewhere else on the internet. The links that connect one website to another website and one web page to another web page within a website.
The search engines remember these links from one web page to the next. Google has a piece of computer code called a crawler, it’s name is Googlebot. This crawler follows links out across the internet, from one website to the next, finding other links, analysing text and images and code and moving on. It records all of this information. The crawler records the addresses of all the web pages it finds and creates an index of those pages so it can serve a page to a person who searches for something like, ‘what is SEO?’.
Google’s crawler automatically tracks links and content on the internet as it moves around the World Wide Web 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and accumulates a record of the HTML code (and other types of code, CSS, JavaScript, PDFs and more) in an immense database.
This database is modified if the Google crawler comes by your site again and discovers a new or amended web page. The record of the new form of this web-page is then saved in the index. Based on your website traffic along with the level and frequency of alterations you make on your website, the Google crawler will come more or less frequently, and dive deeply or more shallowly into the depths of your website.
Google’s Gold: It’s Secret Algorithm
After indexing a website, Google is then able to present it in the Google search results page. Google matches up a particular search query (what a person types into Google) with internet pages that it has indexed, according to a range of parameters.
To achieve this Google uses (among other tools) an AI machine learning algorithm it calls ‘Rankbrain’ that chooses which web-pages are displayed in which specific order. The way in which this algorithm operates is a secret. No-one is aware of precisely which factors determine the ordering of the Google search results, but SEO experts with extensive knowledge of what makes websites rank higher and what doesn’t can infer a lot about how Rankbrain does actually work.
Google’s algorithm isn’t fixed, it alters constantly. There are certainly more than two hundred different aspects of how a website is created and how it relates to the internet at large that influences where Google decides to show it on a search results page.
And one of the most difficult things to deal with as an SEO expert is that the significance of those factors and how they influences search results is in constant flux. Google constantly changes it’s mind about what is important. Most of the time it changes its mind in small ways and sometimes the changes are really big. Really good SEO experts learn to flow with these changes and survive the volatility of the results page.
Even though the algorithm is a mystery, Google sometimes does reveal which factors are relevant in its public communications and interactions. SEO companies (like SEO Services NI) don’t know for sure how important those factors are nevertheless, and can only discover these things through extensive minor experimentation and experience over years.
Assessment and experimentation with our websites over time and the great successes we have had presents us now with an excellent impression of the key elements and adjustments that are required by Google to boost position in the search results page.
What bothers us most is the charlatans calling themselves experts that bring the industry into disrepute, and there are far too many of those around.
The Value of Links for Search Engines
It’s extremely important to gain a fundamental comprehension of just how Google and the majority of search engines take advantage of back-links if you want to take full advantage of the power of the internet to maximise online trade.
The amount of back-links directed to a webpage is used as a tool by search engines to decide how significant or authoritative that website is. Therefore, the greater the number of back-links a particular website has, the more significant search engines believe it is.
Taken together external backlinks (from various other web pages to your website) will have a very positive impact on the positioning of a website page in Google’s results. Some backlinks are generally more helpful than others however.
Backlinks from websites that have little content, lots of ads or pages with text copied from other websites are valued negatively by Google and will damage the reputation of your website with Google. Enough of these types of links and your online business will be wiped out. That’s why we as a professional SEO company provide ethical link building services as part of all our packages.
The significance of backlinks really was something which quickly lead to active backlink building. So long as you are gathering backlinks which are helpful and plausible, building links could very well be a quality SEO technique. But when you find yourself gathering (or even worse acquiring) suspicious links, Google will penalize you for that.
Affordable Search Engine Optimization?
Affordable search engine optimization really comes down to how much you put in versus how much you get out. Marketing services need to prove return on investment. At SEO Services NI we gain more traffic to your website and ultimately we help our clients gain more revenue through advice on how to optimise that traffic and turn it into sales (conversion optimisation) with a combination of technical knowledge, experience of e-commerce and common sense.
We provide affordable SEO services because we provide more revenue to a business than the cost of our time and effort. Essentially that’s what we believe online marketing is all about, higher revenue through improved search engine ranking.
Our aim is to boost your web traffic ethically and organically, to boost your sales. Whether you aim to increase your customer base in Donegal, Dublin, Cork or Belfast, or indeed need to push for greater GB or international sales we understand your needs and work to create real return on investment through SEO for all our customers.
So contact us today and find out what we can do for you!