The basics of climbing to the top of Google

1. Why this article?

This article is meant to give a solid overview of how Google looks at websites and how to help yours move up the list to bring you more traffic, more leads, and more sales. The process of search engine optimization (or “SEO”) is one that is a fun mix of art and science. While we talk specifically about WordPress quite often, the same basic principles apply to websites on every platform.

Each section of this article could be a post by itself, so we’ve worked hard to keep things fairly high-level. Once you have an overview of how things work, our hope is that you’ll be able pick out your own weak spots and know how to attack them.

Our other goal with this article is to offer timeless tips for you. You’ll often hear people say that Google is always “changing the rules”, but they’re really not. Since Google came around in the late 90’s, the only rules they’ve really changed is the benefit they’re now giving to mobile-friendly sites and you should have and SSL certificate (https) on your site. Every other algorithm change that you hear about (Penguin, Panda, etc) is focused on slowing down the spammers that are trying to cheat the system. Google doesn’t change the rules — they just get better at enforcing them.

Everything we advocate in this article is well within the bounds of Google’s rules, so you can rest well the next time they push out a big update. In fact, you can celebrate those updates because they mean that more spammers…