What Google Likes? 12 SEO Fundamentals For Articles

• Muhamad Rawi
• 06/05/2018
• 3718
• 4,417

Every day millions of new websites and tons of content is added to the web. The main way of getting acknowledge and having your blog or website visited by users is to be shown on search engines (google, bing, yahoo, or even yandex). Search engines have evolved through years and many of the old tricks that web designers used to do are not working now. It is almost impossible to cheat on search engines and the only way now is to publish great content that users will want to check and read. 

However, good content alone is not enough to gain you much traffic or let's call it (professional traffic) which is the traffic you gain by professionally submitting your web content to the search engines. In this article we will discuss 12 fundamentals of SEO friendly articles or blog posts to catch more traffic on your blog, we are going to answer the question: What google likes?

1- Google likes titles related to content:

Like we discussed in the previous article Here about article titles, google likes your content to be related and relevant to the page title. If your page title is irrelevant to your content you could be punished by google and lose some future decent traffic. 

2- Google likes text content:

Articles based on photographic content and video content without any relevant text content will not be liked by google. In fact, google likes more text content and unless you are 9 gag or 5 minutes craft you should put more effort to text content. Also, photographic content might be susceptible to copyrights and could lose you traffic on the long run instead of building a reputation.

The basic article or blog post shouldn't go lower than 500 words per article as a standard, anything shorter than google will not like.

3- Google likes short but not too short titles:

Short and Relevant, you should keep your title between 50-60 characters, recent reports claim that google raised that limit to 80 characters but anyway you should keep yourself at the safe side for now and keep it to that limit.

4- Google likes genuinely created content:

Genuine content are the key to your success, imagine that you are selling something that only you have and even if your goods aren't so good but you are the only one selling them. Same goes for google and other search engines, they will catch plagiarism and lower your rank if they find your content matched exactly with other websites.

Don't go rewrite articles of other blogs too because no matter how much you rewrite their content they will still have the upper hand of specific keywords you target now, you can just use other websites as a reference and a guide through creating your content and there is nothing wrong with it.

5- Google likes external links:

Weird isn't it? why would google want me to put links of other websites on my website?. The answer is: Because it is good for the internet !. Google likes to keep the traffic of the internet going on and on and it doesn't want users to stop just at your site, instead google wants users to visit your website and go check other websites too and it will al come to you in the end because other users will link your website too and so you will get more referrals from unexpected sources which is nice indeed and healthy for the internet too.

6- Google likes Rich Cards:

A new trend of SEO is to use Rich Cards, remember when you googled some website or food recipe and google showed you that box to the right with full details about that website, product, or even person. This is the Rich Card and you should use them to identify your content to make google understands them more and also understand the link hierarchy of your website or blog. If you are not a professional web developer you should ask help from someone or even watch youtube video tutorials to know more about how to implement Rich Cards to your blog.

7- Google likes a good link strategy:

A good link strategy means your links are properly organised in order to make it easier to browse your website. Your links should be short and related to the content. Short URLs are good but they should be relevant too as google will appreciate that users can memorise your link by using human friendly language. 

Dashes or Underscores?, short answer is dashes. Use dashes to separate your words to make a good title and the reason behind this google trend of liking dashes over underscores could be related that dashes come first on keyboards of both desktops and mobile devices while you need to press shift for example to get an underscore in your desktop. So dashes are easier for users to type and so google like them more as a separator.

8- Google likes shorter load time:

Your full page load time is important to google and the smaller your page size with less memory and bandwidth consuming content (e.g big images or videos) with a faster server response time, google will like you more.

9- Google likes recent sitemaps:

Sitemaps are the guide through your whole website, google likes them fresh, working, accurate, and well indexed. Many websites and tools will help you generate your sitemap for free or for few extra bucks. It is worth it after all as it will help google index your content and gain you more organic traffic.

10- Google likes decent surges in traffic but not acute ones:

If your traffic gets very high for no specific reason in a very short time then google will suspect it for a malicious act. I had a facebook ad for one article once and due to sudden increase in traffic over that exact page, google didn't like it and down ranked that exact page later on. Even if you use social media ads, keep it calm and close to your normal traffic to gain google's reputation slowly but persistently. 

11- Google likes meta title, meta content, but meta tags not anymore:

Keep a relevant meta title of your article and meta content too, these info are the info google uses to show for your page when searched on. However, meta tags are now obsolete and not used anymore as google uses it's own algorithm to generate meta tags for each page but bing still uses meta tags though so no hard of keeping them anyway.

12- Google likes recent persistent content:

Keep your article flow going and always post new content to your blog at a specific time period of your choose. Nothing wrong with posting a new article every month but you should keep it like that, some others decide to post 2 or 3 times per week while others can go every day for new content. Select your own pace and stick to it to let google know that your website is active and always changing.

And finally, they key to success is good relevant persistent unique content of your own creation, don't worry at your beginnings as it might take time to get recognised and build reputation over search engines especially for google. Keep on working and you will be rewarded eventually.

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