Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Much has been written about the algorithm that Google use – much of it unintelligible to the everyday internet user. A comment from “softplus” on a post in the excellent SEO site SEOmoz.org is:

How about reciprocal factors? For example: if the competition is high (threshold or range): use the age-factors; otherwise ignore age. With a sigmoid-type function it’s easy to do (given range or threshold) and it is the perfect model for the famed sandbox.

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing we do not pretend to fully understand this but we are inquisitive and ask “Why does the algorithm matter?”

Well let’s go right back to square one- to the Google corporate website.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

One of the Google founders, Larry Page, said:

The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

So if someone is talking about a search engines complex algorithm issues, take a deep breath and just remember what it is all about – returning the most relevant results for a search query. And remember the opposite of relevant is irrelevant – so Google will try to ignore (or punish) anything it believes is irrelevant (or deliberately misleading).

As Google is trying to determine how relevant a result for a query, it makes sense to try to help it as much as possible to find your result as relevant as possible to the search query. For all the fancy words, this is what most positive SEO is aimed towards – particularly SEO done on the page.

If you distill down all the millions of words written about the Google algorithm, the positive on-page SEO can be fairly simply summed up with the concepts of alignment and consistency.

Alignment refers to making sure all the parts of your site line up with your targeted market – your keyword research should be supported by your URL, your title, your description, your on-page text, bolding keywords for emphasis, using anchor text in links - all so they can be read by a webcrawler:

Consistency means staying true to the market research. Don’t start to stray to topics, texts, videos, images etc that are not consistent with what you are wanting the site to be. A light-hearted post on your cat’s latest adventure may make amusing reason but will not assist in your site Google ranking if you are selling widgets.

When you come to what is known as off-page SEO (so called because it is not on your site), the king of the castle is the number, authority and relevance of links from other sites to your site. Google use a concept called PageRank which we will discuss in our next post on SEO.

Your business buddies
Marshall and Gary