Any of us who advertise our wares online need to nderstand a certain amount about how Google and other search engines work ? Google has over 94% market share for web searches in Ireland (StatCounter) it is the most used Internet search tool. Google is essentially a very clever tool but it can’t read minds! But help is at hand, there are a number of things that you can do to help Google help you.

You have to be very specific about choosing your search terms before you enter it into the search engine. For example singular words will turn up different results than plural terms.Take the words “journalist” and “journalists”. When put into a search engine the results are very different for each search term.The first word that you search for is considered of more important by search engines. So, always put the stronger word first. Google will ignore most punctuations, except hyphens, and quote marks. This is important to note if you are using Google to track inbound links.

There is a limit to the amount of words you can enter into a search. The limit is ten words in Google, which is more than sufficient for any browser. If you enter any more than Google will simply cut off the words that have gone over the limit and you will have to re-think your phrase. If you are going to put a search term in longer then ten words, learn to edit down your searches to a more focused search term.

The results that you see when you enter words into Google search are a list of websites that are thought to be most relevant to the search. A relevant website can be achieved with strong organic SEO on your website. If your site is very relevant you might appear on page one. But equally if your site has no relevance at all to the search term you could end up on page 10 or beyond and never be found by anyone. The importance of appearing on page one of Google cannot be underestimated. The way Google determines if your site is relevant is by a number of on-site and off-site factors that I will be discussing in our next “Understanding Google” blog.