If you are a health practitioner or health-related business in need of search engine optimization (SEO), take a few pointers from human nature to learn how you can succeed online.
It’s amazing how Google mirrors social life. It makes perfect sense, though. Human beings designed Google’s algorithm, so becoming popular with Google should, in fact, resemble something of the process of becoming popular among actual people. And it does! Here are a couple examples of this phenomenon.
If you don’t speak the same language, communication is tough.
You speak English and you have a huge opportunity to consult with a company in Tokyo. The big shot CEO only speaks Japanese. If you’re going to work with him, you have two choices. Learn Japanese (not likely) or hire a professional interpreter. Either way, you’ve got it handled once the communication barrier is resolved.
Likewise, if you want to publish a website that has potential to rank well in the search engine results pages, you have to learn to speak Google. Google has it’s own way of interpreting a site, and it is not about the language in which the content is written. It is related to SEO factors: titles, descriptions, header tags, keywords and other aspects of SEO. If you don’t speak Google, optimizing these critical aspects of your site is impossible.
NO PARKING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
NO PARKING VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED
Just look at the difference proper understanding of punctuation makes. Google has a code – a way of assessing your site’s place in the search engine results and if you don’t know how to communicate your relevance with precision, the search engine will wildly misinterpret your site and you simply won’t rank well in relevant searches.
So, if you don’t speak Google, you have two options: Learn to speak Google (not likely, but possible if you find the right resources and realize it will take nearly the same amount of effort as learning Japanese) or hire an interpreter. Again, this is not about the language and grammar in which your site content is written. It has to do with SEO factors.
Connections: it is all about knowing the right people.
The next Google mirror of human life has to do with the level of authority Google gives your site for ranking purposes. Google ranks every site it can read on a scale of 0-10. The Google home page is a 10. Most sites published are zeroes. Sites that rank for popular key words, locally or internationally, often rank 0-6. Sites ranking 7, 8, 9, and 10 are extraordinarily rare. To learn you site’s page rank, you can get a plug in to your Firefox browser. Just Google it and download. Soon you’ll know every sites rank upon visiting.
Page rank is Google’s opinion of how important your site is. The higher the rank, the more important you are. So, if someone searches for a term that is relevant to your site and a competing site as well, Google will rank your site first if you have a higher page rank, all else being equal.
How does Google determine page rank? The same way people determine social rank. The more people you know – the more connections you have – and the more influential those people are, the greater social importance you achieve. In Googlespeak, connections are often called backlinks. Backlinks are incoming links to your site. Google determines that your site is important if other sites on the Internet think your site is important and link to it.
To use an analogy of how this works, let’s say you’re viewing the resumes of several computer consultants to hire. You don’t know any of them personally, so you definitely want to check their references. Here is the breakdown. Assume all resumes are of qualified applicants:
• Three resumes have no references available and no suggestion of how to get them.
• Two resumes ask you to contact the applicant for references, which you do, but don’t hear back.
• Two resumes have references listed, but require no contact with the references.
• One resume lists one reference only and invites you to contact him with information provided.
• One resume lists three references and invites you to contact them.
• One resume lists three references with contact information and you notice one of the references is a very successful, honest and well-known local businessman.
• One resume lists references and contact information and you notice the same local businessman is there, too, right next to the names of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, with their personal cell phone numbers provided.
So, who wins the ranking contest? It isn’t hard to determine. Now, you may not hire ANY of the applicants when all is said and done. But this isn’t about the hiring decision. It’s about the ranking process. The resume scenarios above are excellent analogies of backlink scenarios for websites. Some have no backlinks whatsoever. Some have backlinks for which Google gives no credit (nofollow links). Others have backlinks that are of low authority (from PR zero sites). Still others have high quality, high authority backlinks. Some sites even have links from prestigious colleges, universities and government organizations. And Google loves these most of all.
Want to come up higher in the searches? You’d better convince Google to think your site is more important than you competitors’ sites. How to do this? Acquire quality, high PR backlinks. When you have thousands of these, or at least more than your competitors in the combination of quantity and quality, you will rank! It’s in the algorithm.
