Your Search Engine Optimisation Expert – Sheldon Nesdale

I’m sick of hearing this: “It’s all about the content of your website when it comes to Google determining your search engine ranking” or “content is king!”.

It’s just not true.

Content is just one of the factors.

Q: How did the phrase “content is king” become so popular?

2 reasons:

1. Based on the assumption that one day Google’s search engine ranking algorithim will be so smart that it won’t be influenced by anything but the text on the page (actually, it’s going the other way – Google’s algorithm is becoming more complex eg here’s a list of many of the factors that go into Googles search engine ranking algorithm)
2. Because the phrase is designed to discourage spammers who fill up thousands of pages with meaningless keywords to get a few clicks from advertising on those pages

Q: Can you have a well ranked website without any content at all?

Actually yes!

On some websites (including government websites), webmasters put a “noindex” tag on the home page which effectively blocks Google from reading the content, but a link to the website can still appear at the top of some searches (just the url by itself, nothing else).

So in effect there is no content on these websites from Google perspective but the ranking can still be very good.  A Google software engineer explains in this short YouTube video.

Q: Can search engine rankings be improved without changing your websites content?

Sure.

Many times, I have been approached by clients who have a good website with good content but they want to improve their search engine rankings.

I achieve that for them, not by changing their content significantly, but by using other techniques that essentially tell Google which phrases are the most important i.e. the phrases that we particularly want to rank well for.

A few weeks later, Google acknowledges the changes and you can often see a new plateau in the number of daily visitors the website gets.

Here’s an example.

The screenshot below shows the increase in visitors from the day that “clean urls” were implemented on a clients website.  Essentially this one change doubled the daily visits from an average of 150 a day to 300 a day.

Showing the new plateau after a single SEO change

Would you like to achieve results like this for your website?

I can help.

You have 3 options:

1. Buy the Search Engine Optimisation E-Book. Learn how to do SEO yourself with this low-cost ebook
2. Buy a customised SEO Report for you and your website. Find out exactly what you need to do next to improve your Search Engine ranking
3. Or just call me on (07) 575 8799 today or email me to have a chat about your website

If you research this question online you will find that people are divided into 2 camps:

1. Half think that Google does take clean urls into account when it calculates the rank of your website
2. Half think that Google treats clean urls the same as url’s with query strings

(For the record, I am in camp 1).

But we are asking the wrong question(s).

The right questions are:

• “Do users care about clean urls?”
• “Do they find them useful?”
• “Does it improve usability?”

Perhaps it is true that Google doesn’t mind whether the url is clean or a query string when it is calculating ranking, but I think humans care A LOT.

When you do a search, you’ve noticed that the keywords you used in your search are bolded wherever they appear? Well keyword rich urls get bolded too and that is another indicator to the visitor that your site is the one they should visit.

Everytime you get a click and that person doesn’t click “Back”, Google thinks “aha! I sent you to the right place!”, and that’s when you can climb up the rankings.

So if clean urls are good for the user, they are good for Google because Google wants what the searcher wants – to send them to the right website.

I think clean urls are worth it whatever the cost.

Everytime I have recommended clean urls to customers, and everytime I have changed over to clean urls on my websites, the web traffic has doubled over a 3 month period.

Users love them.  And so Google will value them more and more over time.

Need more fantastic Search Engine Optimisation tips like this?

Call me on (07) 575 8799 or email me.

- Sheldon.