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  • Writer's pictureMason Jacob

What Are Google Rankings And How Important Are They?

You've just set up a new business website, and you're eager to start ranking for your target keywords. But how important are rankings, really? What is a good rank, and what does it mean for your business? In this post, we'll cover the basics of Google rankings — its history and evolution — as well as the role that search engines play in directing traffic to your website.


1. What are Google Rankings?

The Google search engine is the most used search engine on the internet. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The process of organizing this information is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. When you search for something online, your web browser translates an approximation of the search phrase into a set of safe and accurate words and phrases your computer then attempts to match to specific web pages.

Google’s algorithm translates your web query into a set of characters called a URL, which means simply “search page.” Google searches your URL each and every time you type it into your web browser, and indexes all of the pages on the internet related to that query. Each page that ends with.com gets placed in a snippet (similar to a web page’s address bar), while.edu domains get placed in a directory. For every page you visit, Google tries to match its URL to the one Google indexes. In order to index all of the pages on the internet, Google has to be able to tell which pages are relevant to its search query. And there are a few different ways that Google does this.

Google uses many different methods to determine how relevant a page is to a search query. Based on these methods, Google builds a ranking score, which takes into account factors such as the page’s content, how well it relates to your brand, the language used, and the popularity of the pages. In other words, this method takes into account the totality of a page’s content, not just its title, which makes it valuable for ranking.



2. How is Google Better Than Other Search Engines?

Google is king of search engines, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best. When it comes to results, Google is usually the best search engine, but when it comes to ease of use it can be clunky and confusing. Google’s results are often cluttered, hard to read, and overly complicated.

Below, you’ll find a full consultation, which we hope will provide you with clear answers to some of your questions:

Our seminars are generally no longer ongoing, so please keep that in mind when you view the link to sign up for a free course.

Here’s the thing: search engines have evolved from simple to complex, and it’s not always easy for newbie website owners to decide which version is best for their business. Historically, Google is the search engine that most people first turn to — but as we’ll see, the Google-powered rankings influence many others. The answer depends in large part upon whether you want your business to appear first in local search results, or show up in Google’s pair of visually searchable aircraft carrier-like main rankings that are known as the “back end” and the more popular “top pages.”

Online locals love to use Google, but it can be a pain in the butt to get it to work the first time. Let’s take a look at some free and paid SEO tools that you can use to improve rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). These premium tools can offer you further alternatives to Google, as well as ways to earn the trust of Google’s algorithms through websites that use them to campaign against certain webpages or keywords.

The simplest way to rank on Google is by using a website’s back-end SEO, or back-end webmaster (or SEO) skills. These days, with so many search engines, it’s impossible to write a content marketing strategy — or even simply tell a keyword research or copywriting strategy — without including the proper back-end SEO skills into it. SEO doesn’t need to be nerdy tech-geeky stuff.



3. Who Gets The Most Traffic From Google?

Before we get into Google’s internal workings, check out this excellent explainer video from Corey Jones. While you watch the video, keep in mind that this tutorial is only the first phase of our ranking strategy. Once you understand the basics, you can begin to think about your URLs, keywords, and how best to rank for them. In this post, we’re going to focus on how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works, and it’s important that you also understand the value that search engines and site owners bring to your business.

Rank Analysis is the process by which Google identifies your site as being of a high enough quality to be ranked in the search engine’s results. As we’ve already learned, Ranks determine what kind of website you obtain in the search result page (SERP). This ranking allows users to effortlessly choose the website they want to visit and stay there. Just to had an understanding of how it works: search engines, such as Google, have algorithms that constantly monitor the quality of web pages (pages on the web that appear in search results) to cull the seed of potential organic traffic to the online marketplace. It’s these pages that receive the most attention from competitors looking to steal a share of the search market share (search engine optimization, SEO).

Basically, search engines know the difference between good (or valuable) and bad websites. They automatically take into account website architecture (how portions of the web are structured), external links, pdf downloads, semantic content and so much more to determine how search engines should rank your content in a SERP.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these things with a quick breakdown.

Good websites typically follow a structured and structured hierarchy, ensuring user readability and accessibility.



4. How Do You Rank Well In Google Searches?

Today, Google is a $700 billion marketer and search engine, which is why understanding their overall strategy and what makes Google tick is our first goal. Let’s start by understanding their overall mission, and then we’ll look at a little history of when Google started, where they started, and what they do today. To understand Google’s overall mission, it helps to understand what they do, why they do it, and what they’re trying to achieve. Google is in the business of giving search engine results for whatever you want to do Search.

The company’s origin is traced back to two founders: Brin and Page. They were working at a company called Highbrow, which was an educational search engine for the elite. Their goal was to enable people to find what they were looking for using structured data that was already publicly available. The founders used an internet service provider they had access to through their jobs, and the idea for the search engine was born.

Eventually, they formed the Google Search Engine Development Group, and together they ended up hiring David Packard, who went on to serve as the company’s first CEO.

One of the founders of Highbrow, however, bore little resemblance to Brin and Page. He was also David Brandt, who had developed a tool called Acorn, which is a simplified web browser, as well as a programming language called Basic. In other words, he grew up around computers, and he was the first person Brin and Page ever hired.

Later, when they were still called Google Inc., they changed their name from Google Search to Google. This was so that they could take over an AT&T computer company, and their new name stuck.


5. Why Are Rankings So Important For Your Business?

For your business, rankings are extremely important as they’re a clear indication of how well you’re doing. The higher you’re ranked, the more people will see your business. This can be a great way to get more customers to your business and generate leads.

Basic Google rankings basics

As of January 2012, this is how Google rankings work: Your website is listed on the first page of Google for any given keyword or phrase. This is the easiest rank to get. If you’re ranked #1, search engines actually display a massive amount of Google-flavored branding for your business at the top of the search results page (SERPs). Naturally, this serves two important purposes: (1) that users see your company’s face (for the rare instances when you’re not actually home), and (2) that Google associates your business and website with good search quality.

How to get a high Google ranking

For your site(s), you need to:

Optimize your site’s page templates.

Enable webmaster tools access.

Test and get caught up on caching issues.

Treat search engines as you would a customer — act reasonably and be helpful.

What a good rank is and what it means for your business

The Basics of Google rankings

PageRank (3.5)

When Google first started ranking pages, they used something called PageRank. It basically boiled down to a popularity and number combination where 1+ PageRank = 1. A PageRank greater than 7 indicates Google considers your page valuable.

Prior to PageRank, Google's primary ranking factor was links. Once they realized Google wanted higher relevance, they started favoring popularity as well. PageRank wasn't always important, though. According to Google, it should be the starting point for a quality signal.

Google states (emphasis mine):

When Google started ranking web pages, no one noticed the use of PageRank. It took only a few months for the importance of popularity and links to be discovered by Google engineers, and for popularity, numbers to become the primary factor.

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