Don't be afraid to get what you want from the big G.
People often refer to Google as one of two things, either a garbage bin or a trove of information.
The truth is Google is neither.
It's really just a concierge, a middleman, tasked with connecting searchers with relevant content.
Google Needs You
Google doesn't offer people information, it attempts to connect people with information.
If you're a serious business that helps people and your website reflects that, Google will start to pick up on that.
Google needs more high quality websites in its ecosystem.
There's far too many poor, bad, unhelpful or downright spammy and virus laden websites in its ecosystem right now.
Google Reads Your Website Different Than A Human
The staff at Google are too busy playing ping pong or video games to actually look at websites.
Instead, Google uses Googlebots, robotic AI crawlers, similar to the tentacle machines in The Matrix that crawl through the tunnels looking for Neo.
Yep, you read that right.
image source: https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Sentinel
Googlebots are software programs that crawl through cyberspace reading website code.
For best results, your website needs to be easily read and accessible to these crawlers, which forms the practice the industry calls "On Page SEO".
In a nutshell it involves the use of keywords but there's a lot more to it.
Both You And Google Service People
That said, too many people forget that the goal of your website is to service actual people, not Google's creepy crawlies.
If you've ever seen a website that had keywords stuffed into almost every sentence, you'll know exactly what I mean.
I've seen websites written so badly it was almost impossible to actually understand them.
To a customer, it looks ugly and it's a massive turn off.
Yet thousands of SEO agencies follow this (and many other) self-defeating strategies.
I'll talk more about this later.
I can build you a website that shows up in Google without you even paying for SEO.
Be great Alan Frye