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Essential Steps to SEO: What to Do to Get Noticed by Google Bots

By Elizabeth Price, Freelance writer
Apr 15, 2019

Google optimization.

If those words didn’t put you to sleep, then you’re here on a mission. And that mission just might be improving your text and SEO, becoming more noticeable by Google Bots.

Google bots are like your crush - if you don’t do something to gain their attention, they will never notice you.

Nobody FULLY knows how bots work (thanks to Google). However, if you trust the examples of top blogs and sites - you can improve your traffic and SEO optimize get to those sweet top-10 spots in Google’s search.

And it’s not that hard.

How Google Bots Work

You might remember that 90s internet was a bit… strange.  

A lot of websites were just keyword junkyards - their sole priority was to show up in top results. Remember stuff like hiding white text in white sections of the site? Yuck.

Luckily, Google has become smarter and employed a new system called crawlers. These crawlers use algorithms to “crawl” through text and identify whether it’s good or bad content. Crawlers’ major algorithms are updated regularly, however, we have no clear picture of their inner mechanics.

But we know that bots have become smart enough to identify ‘keyword junkyard’ websites and successfully ‘nerfed’ their ranking factors, just like that - no more 90s internet.

These bots are well-trained in the intricacies of the English language and have probably read more books than you. Google spiders can identify basic grammar and logic errors quicker than Grammarly.

But don’t be nervous. We know a few things these bots like.

Step 1: Responsive Design

Let’s agree: people are attracted to beauty and simplicity. The internet has genuinely evolved regarding design layouts - no more high-contrast matrix looking websites. Websites look slick and organic, with pleasant colors and designs luring you to keep scrolling. And that’s what will help to rank.

Trends in design change every half a year with designers looking out to update their site.

Responsive design is more than a palette of color schemes and fonts. It is inextricably linked to webpage loading speed and better user experience, which result into higher ranking. Although design aspects not related to the quality of the content itself, they are highly beneficial for SEO and keep people on the site.

Average on-page time and thus better user experience is something that Google bots surely notice.

Screen Shot 2019-04-15 at 13.56.49

Step 2: Keyword Optimization

This is the nitty-gritty part of your SEO strategy: keywords.

Keywords help people find things on the internet. They categorize your content so that people looking for “Italian food” won’t end up on “German sofas.”

Google tries to cover as many search queries as possible. With the artificial intelligence near at hand, one can enter a unique long sentence not matching any of the previous search results and still find what they need.

Here are the basic types of keyword matches you need to know for an inclusive on-page optimization.

  • Broad Match. Broad match matches your keyword to all relevant searches and variations. It’s the most default match type. For instance, if your keyword is “men’s shoes,” people looking at “buy shoes for men” might see your page. The best practice is to cover all synonymous variations of your product name and add commercial words around it.
  • Exact Match. Exact match is the polar opposite of broad match. Exact match shows pages or ads which match the searched query exactly or are very close variations of a particular keyword phrase. Close variations refer to queries where the keyword is reordered, but the meaning doesn’t necessarily change. For example: “buy men’s shoes online” and “men’s shoes buy online” mean the same thing, and are therefore categorized as an exact match.
  • Phrase Match. Keywords where reordering the phrase does make a difference are phrase match keywords. Adding words right before or after that phrase makes no difference. For example "men’s shoes" and "brown men’s shoes" work as phrase match keywords. But "men’s shoes" and "men’s cheap shoes" do not.
  • LSI Keywords. These are the keywords which are semantically related to your primary keyword. They are not synonyms, but words which are often found together. Like "android", "google play" and"mobile OS".  

Websites use tools like Ahrefs to find these keywords. These tools also give you statistics of how popular the keyword is, and which site ranks first when you look it up.

Keywords only cue the bots as to what your site is about. The real magic is hidden in the quality of your writing.

Step 3: Well-Written Content

As Google’s algorithms evolved, they started differentiating between good and poorly written content. Although black hat techniques might still work for promoting thin content in some cases, such pages will not get high ranks in the long-term perspective.

There’s an interesting experiment you could do. If you take a historical text like Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and paste it into a keyword density tool - you’ll see that certain words show up more than others. No, MLK did not write that piece for Google crawlers. He used the narrative technique of repetition to persuade his audience.

Coherent and argumentative thinking appeals to both readers and machines. Google didn’t create bots to make the English language adapt to them. In fact, quite the opposite.

Bots analyze keywords in right places; they examine vocabulary, grammar, and readability. They do that because these are the qualities of any good text - be it written in the 19th or 21st century.

Writers today use these modern tools to speed up the process of producing quality text:

  • Grammarly
  • Hemingway App
  • All in One SEO
  • Thesaurus

However, for a trained writer - a writer who’s got the rules of grammar and punctuation ingrained into the fabrics of their brain - these are mere tools for a quick proofread.

There’s no doubt that human editing and proofreading will always bring better results. You can always use a quick help from EssayPro essay writing service to check your writing. Of course, you can give it to a friend or check the text yourself. The question is if any of you have enough expertise in the field.

Step 4: Indexing

After you’re done with all of the above, it’s time to submit the page for indexing. This should be the easiest part.

Ask Google to index your website using a simple URL inspection tool.

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Source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ezoic-site-content/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/18110134/fetch-as-google-min.png

Choose Request indexing for the tool to run a quick live test. This test checks your page for simple indexing issues. If you’re clean and good to go - your page will be queued for indexing.

Indexing should take anywhere between four days and four weeks. Every case is different, and some claim to have had their page indexed in under four days.

As with everything Google, we will probably never know the exact inner mechanics.

Conclusion

Google Bots are an ever-evolving algorithm. We are left to speculate and experiment to see where these algorithms will go next.

That being said, we do know SOME things.

Responsive design has brought millions of people to the internet. Abolishing high-contrast matrix looking websites was the internet’s best development yet.

Keyword optimization helps the reader find exactly what they’re looking for. Therefore, every website or blog must have a set of keywords used for reference. And these keywords must correlate with their directories and sections.

Well-written content is not about satisfying Google Bots; it’s about following the basic rules of writing. If you grab a piece of historical text and analyze it through Google, Google will think it’s a good text.

Write for users, not for bots - that’s the golden rule.

Story by Elizabeth Price

Elizabeth Price is a freelance writer interested in education, marketing, and business-related topics. A former Psychology student of Montclair State University, she is particularly interested in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Currently expanding her horizon by undertaking a journalism course in New York, she regularly works as a content creator and assistant editor. Despite being kept quite busy with work and family, she still finds the time to enjoy long walks on the beach with her dog to relax.

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