Whether you are just starting in online web marketing or have been deep in the trenches of Search Engine Optimization for a while now, there is an update that you should be aware of. Google recently updated their webpage titled “How Search Works.” This may not sound like big news, but this page gives insight into exactly what SEO best practices are concerning Google search. If you have been looking for a greater understanding of search results ranking, look no further than google.com/search/howsearchworks. This update can help you specifically curate your content to align with Google’s discovery parameters.

What is How Search Works?

While the How Search Works page is not a complete SEO guide, it gives insights into some key practices that you can use to develop your site better to align with Google’s search practices. For instance, the page demonstrates why automated keyword matching is so vital. The text displayed on-screen shows that 15% of daily searches are unique. Therefore Google needs automation in order to curate content that is both relevant and reliable. “To help you find what you’re looking for, these systems consider many factors, including the words in your query, the content of pages, the expertise of sources, and your language and location”.

With that in mind, as you develop your own webpage, it is important that you focus on these factors above all others. This will ensure that your page ranks more highly among Google searches. This does not mean that you limit your development to these ranking factors but that these should be among the top considerations.

Keywords & Other Factors

Let us look at a couple of these factors more closely. Firstly, keywords. If you have been doing web marketing or SEO for any length of time, you understand that keywords are invaluable. Using the right keywords when developing content can make all the difference in the success of your marketing campaign. Learning how to find what relevant keywords to use in your campaign is vital, but understanding why can give an otherwise mundane process more weight.

From the How Search Works page, we learn that Google uses keywords to determine the relevance of a page for a search. It tells us that if keywords appear on the page, headings, or body of the text, the information is deemed more relevant by the automated systems Google uses to build their search results. Secondly, backlinks. While How Search Works does not specifically use the term backlinks, it does inform us that having links to a page from another prominent website is viewed as a marker of reliability.

Insights

While the information on the How Search Works page is by no means intended to be an SEO master class, it does provide some basic insights that help to guide you on the right path. For a more in-depth look at Google search practices and how you can use them to improve your own search rankings, a good place to start is Google’s own Search Central. In addition, hiring a company that already understands SEO is one of the best tools to getting your business to the top of Google search results.