If blogging is one of your side hustles, you’ll want to read this post. All of my information is coming directly from Google, so you can fact check it for yourself. There’s no guessing or theories here. I’ve focused on the parts of this documentation that are most relevant to you as the writer of a blog, rather than all the technical details of website coding.
Understanding How Google Decides to Show Your Page
Google goes through a process before deciding to show your posts and pages in search results. It’s called crawling and indexing. Without getting too technical, this means that Google analyzes your website and stores the information it finds. That way, when someone searches on Google, it can determine what websites to show.
Still with me?
Okay, so, when Google visits your website (“crawling”), it’s discovering that it exists.
Then, it determines what your website is about and stores that information (“indexing”). When Google is doing this, you want it to know what your posts are about so people can find them when searching. You also want to prove that your post is high quality, so it ranks higher. Google says there are hundreds of factors that go into this decision. It also is clear that you can’t pay Google to rank your page higher.
If you want to make sure Google is indexing your posts, go to search.google.com/search-console and enter your website. You’ll have to prove your ownership of the domain. If it’s not, you might have some technical issues blocking Google from visiting your site (which is beyond my area of expertise).
So, how do we tell Google what our content is about and prove it’s high quality? Here’s the information straight from the source:
1: Avoid Spammy Behavior
When determining where to rank your website in search, Google considers if it looks like spam (and if it violates any of Google’s other policies, such as containing exploitative or copyrighted material).
Here’s some reasons you might get flagged as spam:
- You title your content as something it’s not
- You show different information to search engines than human visitors
- You create many pages or websites to funnel users through your website to generate more traffic
- You purchased an expired domain and “provide little to no value” on the page
- If your website has been hacked
- You use tricks like hiding text behind images or white text to manipulate SEO
- You fill pages with keywords unnaturally to try to gain visibility
- You exchange or pay for others to link to your page
- You’ve paid for bot traffic
- You use AI to mass create content
- You take content from other websites
Basically, if you’re trying to cheat the system in any way, Google will flag you as spam.
Here’s the takeaway: use SEO and keyword best practices, but don’t abuse them. If your content is more about SEO than helping your readers, Google will take notice.
2. Use Keywords in Key Locations
Don’t get me wrong—Google isn’t anti-keywords at all. Here’s where Google does recommend placing keywords:
- In the title
- In headings
- In alt text
- In link text
3. Make Sure Your Images Are High-Quality
Google will take notice if your images are blurry.
It also matters what you name your file. That tells Google what’s in the image (yet another way to tell Google what your posts are about). However, Google says that the alt-text is the most important. Just don’t stuff the alt-text with keywords (see heading 1).
Also, make sure your image is in one of these formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, or AVIF.
However, Google notes to make sure your images aren’t making your website slow down. You can check that using a website like pagespeed.web.dev.
That’s All We Know (Officially)
These are the main areas Google outlines for website writers. The main idea? Create high-quality content, and make it clear to Google what that content is about.
If you have content that will educate or entertain people, Google wants to show your posts to them.
All you have to do is work with it to prove your value.
What do you think of Google’s SEO tips? Which have you found to be the most useful to your blog?