Quick: Anyone remember Netscape? AltaVista? Yahoo?
They were how people found things on a newfangled invention called the World Wide Web before Google became a ubiquitous verb.
It’s hard to believe, but Google has been around for nearly two decades now–the equivalent of about two centuries in internet time. Incredibly, the company’s market share just keeps growing–Google is the search engine of choice on 79 percent of desktop computers around the world, according to Net Market Share.
Will we ever stop Googling things?
“At first, when voice search got popular on phones, everyone thought, ‘That’s the end of Google.’ It didn’t really turn out that way,” Pam Ann Aungst, president of Pam Ann Marketing LLC, told the Morristown Women in Business on Tuesday.
“People use the voice search sometimes, but not that often,” said Aungst, a self-described geek since the age of 6 who specializes in SEO–search engine optimization–to make business web sites show up more often in Google searches.
Voice search applications such as Apple’s Siri for iPhones and Amazon’s Alexa for the home will enjoy niche appeal–without dethroning Google, predicted Aungst, who has a master’s degree in marketing from Regis University.
“I tend to believe that for certain searches, yeah–if I want pizza and I’m in a rush, I’m going to ask my phone or my Alexa ‘What’s the best pizza place in town?’
“But if I’m looking for the best possible company to come in and do something for my business, and I’m going to invest thousands of dollars, I’m going to sit down at my computer and I’m going to trust Google still,” she told the lunchtime gathering at The Artist Baker on Cattano Avenue.
Since Google’s not going away anytime soon, Aungst advised paying attention to SEO. Boosting your “Google juice” is as much art as science, because the company guards its search ranking formulas as zealously as McDonald’s guards it secret sauce.
Google’s algorithms weigh approximately 200 factors when deciding which sites land atop its search pile; Aungst said experts have deduced this from the company’s patent applications and from Google’s tips for web developers.
Generally speaking, she said, Google likes a combination of technical elements (fast-loading pages, mobile-friendly design, etc.), fresh content and links from reputable sources to that content.
Above all, content is king.
“The more the better,” Aungst said.
Look for more content from the Morristown Women in Business in September 2017, when the group resumes its monthly networking events, said co-founder Mary Dougherty.