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Good Google Results: Part You, Part Them

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If you are in the midst of running your firm, getting to depositions and to court, taking care of existing clients and working to get new ones, you probably don’t have much time to think about how search engines work. You probably don’t really care. You just know that they are handy tools to have, and that you would like it very much if your site was listed at the top of the rankings.

But if you are considering using our DSS system, it is in your best interests to have a basic idea of what Google and other search engines are looking for. If you plan on putting your monthly newsletter on to your site, wouldn’t it be better to adjust the writing so that it becomes more attractive to Google? Wouldn’t you want your site to creep up to the top? That’s better than having the first spot in the Yellow Pages.

The first thing you need to know about Google is that it is an index that is constantly adding pages and content. Does it add every single page that is posted on the web to the index? Absolutely not. There are millions of sites out there that don’t register on Google at all.

The first thing that Google does on a daily basis is “crawl” the internet, which means that they use extremely powerful computers to go over the billions of pages on the web. The program that does this is called “Googlebot,” which is an algorithm that goes from webpage to webpage. Google won’t get any more specific than that, and they won’t for good reason. This is the cornerstone of their entire business.

While the crawling is going on, “Googlebot” compiles an index of all the words it sees on your site. This is the part that is important, because they are looking for relevance. The point of Google is to be a useful tool for the users, and it most certainly isn’t doing its job if it is easily fooled. This is why things like “link farms” or “meta tag farms” don’t do very well. If you have a site with a Shel Silverstein poem at the top and every conceivable description of your firm’s practice in tiny letters at the bottom, Google will recognize this instantly, and your site will be ignored. If you have content that both describes your site and has well used keywords in the midst of it, Google notices and then places you in its site index.

(At this point you should bear in mind that when we say “Google,” we don’t mean a group of guys in cubicles. We mean the software. So, no, there isn’t anyone that you can take out for a round of golf and an NBA game in exchange for better rankings.)

Many people think that Google rankings are similar to baseball standings, or the Billboard R&B charts, but that’s a little inaccurate. For one thing, everyone searches differently. You might look for information on something in a completely different way than another person. For instance, let’s say that you live in Louisville, Kentucky and your kitchen sink springs a leak. You might type in “Plumbers in Louisville Kentucky.” This is a query that would give you exactly what you need. But the guy next door might not be as computer savvy, and he might type in “Kitchen sink leaks.” Whether or not the guy next door gets good results depends on how savvy the plumbing companies are. If the plumbing company writes content that discusses plumbing problems as well as their company info, then they might rank very highly if someone types in “Kitchen sink leaks.” But the odds are that the guy next door is going to get a list of do it yourself plumbing sites, which isn’t really what he needs. So he’ll end up grabbing the Yellow Pages, where he’ll end up calling “AAAA Plumbing,” because they do things alphabetically there.

Getting a good search engine ranking depends both on the content on your site and the people who are looking for you. Since the people out there in the world are very unpredictable in how they search for things on the internet, the best thing that you can do is to do your site the right way. At Foster Web Marketing, we shape our clients content to cover both the obvious queries (for instance, “New Hampshire Car Accident Lawyer,) and the not-so-obvious ones (for instance, “car accident concord lawyer”.)

If you are interested in maximizing the web presence of your firm, contact us for a consultation.