Interesting Facts About Google and SEO

Even people who have mastered search engine optimization are still a little confused as to exactly how it works. Understanding page rank and how to gain it are some of the most important steps to SEO online. Even if you do understand SEO and page rank and how to use it on your website the ever changing Internet will still throw a few loops at you.

Below are some very interesting facts about Google and SEO to help you better understand why and how to use it.

SEO is not just about the frequency of keywords. Saturating a web page with the prescribed keywords is not a guarantee that it will get the attention it desires. According to studies, keywords should only make up around 2-3% of the entire post – anything more than that would be deemed overkill (which also entails possible penalties for the site). So that should only about 10-15 words out of a 500-word article.

Google is not just a search engine; it’s also an advertising company. In 2012, Google’s annual revenue was a record-high $50.2 billion, of 67% came from paid advertising and pay-per-click marketing. This is more evidence that SEO is not solely a keyword-driven strategy, as Google would only base the search results ranking of sites that are optimized according to content, presentation and proper usage of keywords.

People want the best results. When efforts are put into generating search engine presence on Google, exposure on the first page is the desired, no, make that the imperative target. It might be a rather ambitious goal to start with, but you should know that according to a study, people choose the top 3 search results 60% of the time, and 70% of these people never go to the second page. They’re more likely to change their search keywords rather than hitting “next page”.

Google is the alpha dog. 65% of the total search engine market share is owned by Google. The top 5: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and AOL. But this is not to say that other search engines don’t quite make an impact. Sites like MyWebSearch, WebCrawler or Lycos still exist and yes, some people stick to their favorites.

Rankings change. A website may have successfully nabbed the top spot on a search results page but there are possibilities that the ranking would drastically change in a matter of weeks. Google uses algorithms to facilitate the rankings and a good spot is not always guaranteed to stay, but it is nevertheless possible.

The regularity of posting makes a huge difference. According to the same study, company websites that blog or post articles at least 20 times a month get 5X more traffic than those who blog only 1-4 times a month. Apparently, search engines tend to treat your website as a “regular” if you keep posting plenty of stuff every month.