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Queen Elizabeth II

The Queen, Google, SEO & Your Website

Today, her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II reaches 90 years of age and something very special just happened to her website. Discover what 'the website search' is and how Queen Elizabeth II can help you to teach CEOs about SEO and strategy.

The "website" search

On page 21 of the SEO management strategy entitled The Art of Search you'll find my first (and perhaps most useful) call-to-hacktion: The Website Search. This call-to-hacktion is incredibly simple yet I believe it is the most powerful example of thinking like a robot and it's an example that completely deconstructs Google and helps business leaders to 'get' Search.

Q. What happens when you type only the word 'website' into Google's search box?

Go make yourself a cup of tea, right now

Stop to take a few moments to firstly consider and then predict which results the search engine may return. You're going to want the full impact of this call-to-hacktion so please don't execute that search just yet, really think this through. Give this question of mine some genuine and serious thought then, as you finish your cuppa, write down your predictions of what the search engine results will be. Now, fire-up your web browser and search the word website on Google or your preferred search engine and hit the search button. Compare your list to Google's results. Did the search engine's results match what you anticipated and predicted?

Start thinking like a robot

It is logical to deduce that the one common-denominator that each and every website has is that each is a website; I argue that it is highly probable that Google doesn't bother wasting time indexing the word website on the vast majority of sites just in the same way as you would not bother recording the word human in your business CRM system or sales database.

From Google's perspective, everything is a website.

Therefore, by doing 'the website search' you are accepting that Google will mostly ignore the word you just searched with, you are accepting that you are bypassing Google's primary relevancy filter and that you are, fundamentally, hacking into the primary search engine logic by giving the search engine no keywords whatsoever to work with. So, what your website search does is to break-open Google and allow you to see the bits that make it work, to force Google to divulge which websites it considers to be the most reliable, authoritative, popular and fresh.

Today is the Queen's 90th birthday

The Art of Search and the website searchWhen you execute 'the website search' from the UK you will normally find www.royal.gov.uk ranking consistently at about #24. Today is Queen Elizabeth II's 90th birthday and, this morning, the rank of her website shot-up from #24 to #12. Nothing dramatic had changed on her website, no SEO specialist had been tinkering behind the scenes, all that made this happen was for the Web to start talking about the Queen's 90th birthday today. I know of no better or simpler illustration you can use to communicate that a search engine ranking is not all about keywords but the energy generated, cultivated and harnessed by a website.

Deep down inside Google's index is a mathematical opinion of how trustworthy (how reliable, authoritative, popular & fresh) a website truly is. You can use 'the website search' to hack into Google and uncover this opinion.

We all appreciate how important website content is yet the very nature of the Web itself (its links and its traffic) is a key indicator of the amount of energy a website wields. This level of energy is a stable, constant and wholly trustworthy indicator that should never be underestimated.

Just 2 weeks ago the British Monarchy relaunched their website at www.royal.gov.uk and the Google rank, as declared by 'the website search' this morning, budged not one single degree. Proof that SEO isn't "all about changing stuff on your website". However, the very second that the Web chose to turn its attention upon The Queen her website rocketed-up Google's rankings by a spectacular 50%. The dynamics of the web (popularity & freshness) are crucial to organic SEO and prove that what anyone is thinking or saying about you can be just as important as what you say about yourself and how you go about saying it on your website.

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