It’s easy to assume that you could explore the entire internet via Google, but in reality the search engine has only indexed .004% of the entire web. This equates to roughly 200 terabytes of data and counting, as Googlebot is continuously crawling through known sites trying to find links to new ones. The question is, how does Google organize such a large amount of data to be able to deliver query results to users in less than a second? The answer is through site indexing.
Once Google has discovered a website, it then ranks it within its index on a scale from 0 to ∞. The more links one site has to other sites that Google recognizes and trusts, the higher its index score will be. These scores determine which sites show up first in the results of a keyword search.
This is where search engine optimization comes into play; control your rank rather than letting your rank control you. By ensuring that your website is ranking well you will increase your visibility to potential clientele and gain a higher flow of traffic to the site.
In order to ensure that your company’s website is visible to google, and ranking highly among competitors, you can use SEO tools such as semrush.com to view any websites index score directly from a google search. You can see from the chrome SEMrush ad-in in the following photo, that the University of Utah’s main website has a google ranking of 1,500, and that other search engines such as Bing rank sites differently.
One easy way to increase your visibility is to use keyword analysis through the adwords keyword planner. Including influential keywords in your website’s meta description and content will automatically improve the chances of being visible to customers and will improve organic search visits. Another is to foster links between other websites and your own – an easy trick is to link your social media accounts to your website. Social media networks such as linkedin.com, Instagram.com, twitter.com, and facebook.com all have built up a respectable rapport with Google and can greatly enhance your own ranking.
Google’s ranking algorithm is constantly changing, as SEO managers it is in our best interest to track it and adapt our websites along with it, or else succumb to the depths of rarely visited second page of search engines.
Annie Smart