Search Engine Optimization has been misunderstood and misrepresented from the start. The greatest misrepresentation about websites was believing if you had a website you could sit back and the visitors would just flood in.
It has taken a great deal of education to help business owners appreciate how Search Engine Optimization is integrated with search queries. It all starts with a query…”Pizza shops near me”. Every search query is now matched against the index of information that the googlebot has discovered on your website by crawling it for its content.
You don’t “add” SEO to a website.
How people find you is through search queries. Visitors don’t know that you exist but they find you by searching for answers with Google. They look for websites with the answer to their question.
How you show up and where you show up is based on the amount of content that helps answer your visitors question. This is commonly referred to as “Ranking”. You see this frequently as the Search Engine Results Page. The SERP page ranks websites based on how relevant they are to the original query.
Ranking is tied to content of course. So how does Google decide which pages rank higher or lower. Like the recipe for Coca-Cola: nobody knows exactly what goes into the search algorithm.
Over the years, Google has had major core updates to it’s search algorithm:
Panda, February 2011
The Panda algorithm update assigns a so-called “quality score” to web pages. Pages with thin content, keyword stuffing and plagiarized were scored much lower. This score is then used as a ranking factor. In January 2016 it was permanently incorporated into Google’s core algorithm.
In the beginning of the web, people thought they could just repeat their desired keyword dozens of times at the bottom of the page and presto!—their website would rank high. Or they would go to another site and cut-and-paste someone’s text. Nasty times back then…
Penguin, April 2012
This update concentrated on looking at fishy or weird link-building efforts. This was period where businesses were sold on the concept of buying external back links into their site. The idea was that Google prized sites that had a lot of links coming into it. It was reasoned that if you had a lot of links pointing to your website that was considered great. As weird as it sounds (It’s weird) “link farms” came into existence. Businesses could buy “links” to point to their website from these link farms.
The other practice that was popular back then was to place links that sounded unnatural or overly done, like “Bucks County highest rated xyz” onto their pages. This was a period of time where businesses, not yours, of course, were trying to trick the search engines into ranking their sites high.
Hummingbird, August 2013
Hummingbird continued the process of looking at your entire site and not just individual pages for keyword relevancy. This update strengthened the interpretation of the searcher’s intent and not just relying on keywords. This made it possible for a page to rank even if it did not contain an exact match. Google employed natural language processing that looked at co-occuring terms and synonyms.
If you want to examine related ideas for your content check out Google Related Searches and Google Related Questions, as well as Google Autocomplete suggestions.
Mobile, April 2015
This was a major update because Google was finally acknowledging the importance and growth of mobile phone usage for searching. The focus in Google searches was now shifting over to mobile issues like speed and usability. Google even developed a page where you can test your url for mobile usability issues.
This time period was also nicknamed “Mobilegeddon” because it was feared that everybody would be penalized suddenly for not having a mobile-friendly site. Today, Google ranks all websites based on how fast and user-friendly their mobile versions are.
RankBrain, October 2015
Rankbrain is a machine learning system that helps Google understand the meaning behind queries and serve best-matching search results in response to those queries. Google calls RankBrain the third most important ranking factor.
Nobody knows the exact formula (Calling Wizard of Oz, maybe) behind this update, the consensus is that RankBrain is responsible for customizing a user’s Google search results.
Bert, October 2019
The update continues and expands on the uses of natural language processing technology to better understand search queries, interpret text, identify entities and relationships between entities. It allows Google to understand much more nuance in both queries and search results.
Conclusion: there is no trick to ranking your website. It comes back to the content that you have on your site. Even more important is that you share your knowledge and expertise through your website. Focus on what you are best at and share that information on your website. Google is focused on matching up the most relevant, trusted website with the visitor’s search query.