Did you know that Google changes its algorithm 500 to 600 times per year?
That means that there are slight tweaks sometimes more than two times per day. While these tweaks are minor, not understanding why they happen and what they are can have a negative impact on your sites SEO. Each day Google makes minor changes in things such as the amount of characters in the title, the amount of weight an H1 heading carries, and the length of text that should be on the page. Some of these may be trivial, but some can also have a drastic impact on your sites SEO. While Google does these minor changes every day, on average every six months to a year Google rolls out a major algorithm change that drastically has an impact on SEO. The last major algorithm change caught a lot of websites by surprise, and dropped a lot of people’s rankings. Websites that were on page one for years, all of a sudden found themselves on page 3,4,5, and down. This drop caused a lot of business owners to scramble to try to find a solution, and for some businesses they had to close their doors. This change wasn’t a surprise, the SEO companies that were Up-to-date on the latest information knew this change was coming. For the businesses lucky enough to have a competent SEO company on their side the impact was minimal to them.
One of Google’s last major algorithm change addressed the need for mobile friendly websites. Google understands that for most businesses, over 60% of its traffic to its website is coming from mobile devices. These are things such as cell phones and tablets. As a business owner, when you realize that over 60% your visitors are coming from cell phones, you understand the need for Google to make the change. This change Google made rewarded sites that had mobile friendly designs. The rollout happened gradually and did not affect every site at once. This change was implemented, then as each site was re-crawled the new rules were applied to that site. This caused some sites to drop immediately, and others to take months, even years for to affect it. Now for instance websites that are responsive, meaning that they scale according to the size of the screen viewing the website, rank much higher than static websites. A responsive website not only meets Google’s new algorithm rules, but is also much more user-friendly, and will scale to fit any size screen.
In conclusion, understanding Google’s algorithm change is vital for doing SEO for your website. Not understanding how the algorithms impact your website, is the same as building a house without using a blue print. In order to do SEO effectively, you have to understand the rules, how they impact you, and how to leverage them for your success. Google gives you the guidelines of what it expects from you, and as long as you follow these guidelines, your website can appear on the first page Google.
This article, “Understanding Google’s Algorithms”, was written by Dan Stalfire with SEO ONE. Dan is an expert in understanding Google’s Algorithms, lead generation, SEO, and web design. Dan has been helping companies for over 21 years achieve first page rankings for their website and acquiring new business. To learn more about how SEO ONE can help you visit us at www.seoone.com or call us at 877 4MY-WEBB.
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