Website design made simple.

Serving Southern Alberta: Calgary, Okotoks, Nanton & Area

Organic Search Engine Results Get crawled and look good doing it.

Did you know that for organic click results out number paid click results 11.6 to 1 (sparktoro.com).

That’s 11.6 reasons for not underestimating the importance of Search Engine Optimization when your website is designed. Meta tags, titles, headers, alt descriptions, layout, content mark-up; these are just a few of the back end sleight-of-hand on page optimization techniques that search engines use to determine your websites ranking in organic search results.

In 2019 roughly 30% of all internet users use ad blockers. (statista.com September 2020)

What this means is that 30% of your potential web visitors and customers aren’t seeing your paid ads. The only way to reach these users is within the organic search results through proper website optimization.

Google. Enough Said.

Google processes 3.5 billion search queries on a daily basis. That’s roughly 40,000 searches conducted every second. (internetlivestats.com 2019)

In North America Google has 89.19% of the search engine market share, in second comes Bing with 5.86% (gs.statcounter.com January-December 2020)

Google’s organic search results by Google’s algorithm PageRank.

The three main functions of PageRank:

  1. Crawling– This is how Google determines what is on your website. Google has crawl bots that visit your website periodically to analyze its content and layout to decide where it should appear in the search results.
  2. Indexing– After your website has been crawled, Google now has to decide where your website should be displayed in the search results. This is referred to as indexing. Indexing is determined by a number of contributing factors that are all a part of the Search Engine Optimization process for your website. Some of these factors include your website containing high-quality informative text containing applicable keywords, photos and videos that display properly and are labeled with informative alt descriptions, meta tags, title tags, headers, backlinks, etc. After Google has gathered all of this data from your website it is stored by Google and referred back to when an internet user makes a search query.
  3. Ranking– When a search query is made in Google uses their very large index of website data and determines which website has the most relevant content. A website that has been properly optimized will rank highly in the search results.

It is important to note that ranking on the first page of organic search engine results doesn’t happen overnight. There is no fast track to “cheat the system” when it comes to organic ranking. Following the due process of optimization and creating high-quality informative content is the only way to see results.

What are some of the important features that Google looks at to determine ranking?

Content is King- Having high-quality, usable, informative content on your website is the single most important factor to determine your page ranking on Google.

On-Page SEO Techniques– Ensuring your different webpages include unique page titles and relevant headers, that your content is keyword-rich (but not too rich) and your meta tags are informative.

Internal and External Links- Having backlinks to your website from other sites are like having a “vote” for your site. The more votes from high and low authority websites, the more Google likes you. The more Google likes you the higher you rank in the search results. Including internal links within your site is also important. Linking old content to new content, linking images and videos and linking to high performance pages are all important factors to consider.

Sitemaps and Robots– Submitting sitemaps and robots.txt files not only provide a map of the different pages on your website they also allow you to remove old content and broken links from Google’s index. It is important that you are updating and resubmitting your sitemap just as often as you are updating your website so Google knows that you are a frequent flyer and like to keep your content fresh.

Google My Business Page– Want to appear above the #1 position in the organic search results? Setting up a Google My Business Page can put your business at the top of the search results for all local search relevant to your website.Google My Business Did we mention that it’s free?

Featured Snippets– Zero click searches make up 50% of all search queries on Google (theedigital.com August 2020). This means that half of all queries are answered instantly on the SERP (search engine results page) with a snippet of information taken from the content of a website. A highly-optimized website with quality content makes you an authority on a topic, improves your visibility and can put you above the #1 search result with your super-informative content.

Mosquito Creek Website Design

For all your website needs