With over 3.5 billion searches per day it’s no secret that Google is the king of online search engines.

 

Website owners and Internet marketing specialists constantly search for the best Google SEO methods to rank highly in Google’s search results pages. In this article, we’ll explain how Google’s SEO algorithms affect your site’s ranking and what you can do to help your pages rank higher.

 

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Think like Google

 

In order to understand Google’s algorithms and SEO, it’s crucial to understand the way Google thinks.

 

Google’s job as a search engine is to return the best possible results for its user’s queries. Google’s algorithms are designed to incentivize quality content from website owners and provide quality, authoritative websites to its users.

 

But content shouldn’t be written for Google —it should be written for users. Google doesn’t rank websites based on how well it likes the information, but how useful the information is to its users.

 

How Google SEO algorithms change

 

Since Google is constantly working to improve its search experience, its algorithms are always changing. This means that SEO is an ongoing project for any website owner.

Each update is designed to make search results better for users. Let’s talk about a few of the most major updates so far.

 

The update named Florida, which happened in Nov 2003, put the SEO industry on the map. This update penalized sites that used black hat tactics like keyword stuffing.

 

In 2005, the XML Sitemap update really allowed SEO to influence site crawling and indexation. It also allowed web owners to submit sitemaps directly to Google using Webmaster Tools.

 

Google Local and Google Maps also became available in 2005, which impacted local SEO and encouraged businesses everywhere to literally put themselves on the map.

 

Vince, an update in 2009, showed SEO favored big brands, which brought about ideas that bigger brands would have long term success in the world of SEO.

 

In December 2010, Google confirmed that they used information from both Twitter and Facebook to determine ranking — a huge step for Google that placed a lot of power in the hands of other companies.

 

In 2012, Google penalized sites that placed ads “above the fold,” saying it harmed user experience.

 

A lot of the Panda and Penguin updates happened along the way that shaped how Google looked at content and external links, respectively.

 

Penguin 4.0, the most recent update in September 2016, enabled real-time index updates and made Penguin a part of the core algorithm.

 

Some of the most popular rules of today’s algorithms include quality content, a diverse backlink profile with quality links, and positive user experience signals.