How Search Engines Work

Understanding search engines is the first step to improving site visibility. Remember, search engines scour the internet using bots called crawlers (or spiders). These bots look for pages and assign keywords to them based on the content in their coding, which is typically done in HTML. A website may frequently use keywords like teeth and dentist. When a crawler picks up on this, it assigns the site to a dental company.

With over 1.7 billion websites on the internet, search engines must decide which ones to show to a user. Googling “Medical Provider in Seattle” will give around 10 million results. The top results are determined based on various factors, not all disclosed by search engine companies.

Between trial-and-error and developer blogs, developers grasp how SEO works. These factors are found to be in a single index score. This rating determines where to place the site about similar sites on search results.

Unique Content Helps in Ranking Web Pages & Reaching Consumers

Don’t use content that’s identical to other sites. Different pages on the same site with similar content will be merged into one search index entry. This may sound bad, but it doesn’t impact search engine visibility as a search penalty might.

As John Mueller (Trend Analyst for Google) clarified, it’s a misunderstanding that crawler bots discard duplicate sites from the search index. A site plagiarizing will likely be ranked below the ones it copied rather than removed from the index. Instead, the index must choose which order to rank the sites in search results.

Word Count

The number of words in a page’s content does not affect its search ranking in Google. The general rule for website writing is that more is better because it gives room for search terms. However, having more words isn’t always ideal. Here are some instances where a word count could help or harm your content:

Helpful:

• Content goes more in-depth with higher word counts.
• Writers need a sense of how much to write.
• Content contains more keywords that don’t seem forced.
• The type of content benefits from being detailed instead of concise.

Harmful:

• Adding filler words or phrases to bulk your word count.
• Content stays at a surface level instead of going in-depth; you frequently repeat yourself.

Utilizing Images

Images can be powerful sources of SEO scores. Using alt text on images gives search crawlers keywords to index the images. Further, it increases the accessibility of the site for people with visual impairment.
Naming files with generic names like “Image1.jpeg” will stop those images from being crawled and indexed. Make the title relevant to your content.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is modifying a site’s layout to adapt based on the platform it’s being viewed on. Google indexing includes a signal to boost a site with a responsive design. It also contains tools to check for mobile-friendliness, like the Google search console.
Apart from the incentive of a higher SEO score, having a responsive design makes for a better user experience. A user will likely leave to find a better site if they try to view a site on their phone only to get minuscule text and scroll bars.

Metadata

• Metadata is an HTML tag readable by a web browser and search engine crawlers. It’s not viewable to site visitors without the use of developer tools. Some search engines have technical requirements involving metadata (like Google requiring that Googlebot isn’t blocked). Apart from technical minimums, metadata has properties that can help crawlers index a site and thus boost its index rating.
• Description tag
  Provides a brief description of the web page that displays beneath the link on search results.
• Keywords tag
  A deprecated tag that used to be used for indexing pages. Crawlers pay attention to keywords in the content instead.
• Viewport tag
  A tag that tells a crawler if your web page is mobile-friendly.
• Robots tag
  A tag that determines which search engine crawlers should index your page. There are many crawler bots assigned to different search engines.

Search Penalties

Though your priority is to reach consumers, you must remember that Google and other search engines use penalties to deter sites from taking advantage of their algorithms to get top results unfairly. These penalties can range from bumping the site’s index rating down a notch to an outright ban from their search results. Here are some manipulative SEO tactics to avoid:

Intrusive Content

Penalty: Reduced index ranking

Intrusive content usually falls under advertisements that obscure the main content. This can lead to frustrating user experiences. Search engines look for and penalize these types of website designs. A giant flag is an intrusive interstitial or popup that covers an entire page without a user’s prompting. Ads that draw over the primary content damage the user experience too much. Therefore, these types of popups should be avoided.

Two types of interstitials aren’t considered intrusive: user-engaged and legally required popups. User-engaged popups are named so because they appear when a user inputs them. This could look like tapping a hint button or a screen asking if they wish to redirect off the site. Legally required popups are interstitials asking users to change cookies or confirm their age.

Misleading Cloaking

Penalty: Removal from the search index

Cloaking shows search engine crawlers content different from what you offer users. There can be multiple reasons for cloaking. One reason is site accessibility. Showing users an accessible site version versus the “normal” one shown to a crawler is a non-malicious version of cloaking.

Alternatively, cloaking can be used for responsive design. Changing your site’s content to fit a mobile browser while showing a crawler the desktop version of your browser is not considered misleading.

This is the kind of cloaking that search engines assign penalties for. However, deception is deliberately cloaking to increase a site’s SEO score. This can be done with redirects mentioned below in the Redirects section.

Keyword Stuffing is an old-school practice of reaching consumers

Penalty: Reduced index ranking

Google penalizes sites that cram in as many algorithm-boosting keywords as possible, also known as keyword stuffing. This can make content hard to read and damage the user experience. This can fall under two categories:

Visible stuffing: Reusing words excessively in a paragraph that adds no additional meaning.

Example: We have a great-quality, low-price shoe store. Our shoes are low-priced so that everybody can afford quality shoes. Many low-price shoe stores have lousy quality, but our low-price shoes are always great.

Invisible stuffing: Hiding keywords out of sight by drawing other elements over them or blending them into a page’s background.

Example: Placing white text full of keywords over a white background or making it too small for a user to read.

Instead of relying on keyword stuffing, try some other tips:

• Focus on a more prominent topic instead of a narrow one.
• Begin with a broad scope, then get into more intricate detail.
• Write an introduction related to the page’s topic but include a way to skip to the main content. Notice how most recipe pages begin with a lengthy introduction to get a crawler’s attention but have a jump-to recipe button at the top for the user.
• Integrate citations to increase word count and credibility.

Redirects

Penalty: Removal from the search index

Similarly, sneaky redirects involve moving the user to another site or page without input. This is an extension of deceptive cloaking. The page web crawlers pick up is full of keywords and content, giving that page a high rating on the index. But this page isn’t designed to be seen by users. Instead of showing it to any user who clicks, it immediately redirects them to a new page.

However, this doesn’t mean that all redirects are bad. Just because a user is automatically redirected without input doesn’t mean it’s considered a sneaky redirect. Here are some examples:

NOT a sneaky redirect:

• Moving the user to a new address for the site.
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• Forcing the user if a page has been merged (e.g., wiki pages with similar names). A different version of the site is based on their browsing platform.
• Redirecting the user to home if the one they’re looking for has been removed

A sneaky redirect:

• Moving the user from a search-optimized site to a user-friendly site.
• Redirecting the user from a site without ads to one full of ads.

Consider allowing the user to return to the page they were redirected from.

One form of redirecting is doorway pages. These are designed to move the user to written content and numerous keywords as they’re designed to catch the attention of a crawler and redirect the user. These pages are often made en masse with few differences between them. For instance, they are creating multiple pages with the same content but changing words to tailor to locations.

Step up your SEO game and reach consumers the right way! 

Take your web presence to the next level. With SEO techniques, your business website will be in the hands of your clients without the need for an advertising campaign. These skills include upgrading your content, utilizing metadata, and avoiding search penalties.

There are many SEO writing tools online. These can help you check your content for search engine engagement. Here are a few to get you started:

• Website SEO checker - Input a page URL to get feedback on its SEO score. This tool accounts for keywords (scarcity and stuffing), metadata, heading tags, content length, and more. Be sure to turn off the ad-block. No sign-up, payment, or download is required.
• Seobility SEO checker  - Similar to websiteseochecker.com, this provides instant feedback with the input of a URL. No sign-up, payment, or download is required.
• Semrush SEO Writing Assistant - Use Semrush’s embedded text box or Google Docs extension to check for SEO in your content. This tool suggests keywords and readability tips for your content. You can check your first document for free.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider - Analyze your site’s SEO score by checking for broken links, faulty coding, site maps, and other details. This software launches a search crawler through your site to simulate how a search engine would see it. It has a free and paid version.