The One Year Anniversary of Google Hummingbird: Optimize For It In 5 Easy Steps

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Google’s Hummingbird is more than a year old now. Though seemingly less Earth-shattering than some earlier algorithm changes, the quiet influence of Hummingbird has had a strong impact on search marketing even while it’s made the Internet a much more useful and pleasant place to visit. Hummingbird is well worth understanding if you’re still seeing lackluster results from your own online presence.Hummingbird was intended originally to better handle punching in, not keywords, but full questions. The people at Google witnessed an increasing number of queries that look like questions in search of answers being punched into their search engine, and primarily from people using smart phones and tablets. An extensive algorithm change, (it’s said to affect some 90% of searches), Hummingbird is not widely understood and certainly, lots of folks don’t take advantage of optimizing for this new version of Google.

Tackling Hummingbird, that is, tackling Google, means any website owner is, today, looking to gain or regain the trust of the search giant. These five steps are the quickest way we could come up with for you to do just that. Think about your site more in terms of a continually evolving magazine sent to your customers. It’s not just about your products but about using and benefiting from them. Like a magazine published by a publishing house, you’ll need to let Google know exactly who and where you are. And make it easy for Google to read all of the data on your site. We’ll get to each of these steps in turn, but let’s start here.

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1. Optimize Lots of Good Original Content
Your entire site should be 100% original and broadly describing your corner of the market. That doesn’t need to mean everything about a small niche, but if you’re really reaching a big corner of the market, then your site should reflect a correspondingly larger description of it. If your running a super market, then, for example, your website might have a bit more about your broader community, and not simply the products.

Keywords are still important, but Hummingbird insist that each keyword be surrounded by enough content that it can’t be easily confused with the same keyword in another context. For example, you don’t want to go to a store selling bass guitars when you’re looking for the perfect sea bass for tonight’s dinner. Google is working to avoid that very same problem.

So, the theme is the sea for one website, and music for another. With enough context and compelling, readable content, you should have no problem making your business clear and understandable to Google, and then, to your readers too. FAQ style questions are a very good way to start thinking about “thematically” organizing content, but work with a good copywriter to expand beyond the question and answer format.

2. About Us / Contact Us / Google +
These pages are more important than ever, but still more important, have a verified Google Plus page for business is the real calling card for your business – in the eyes of Google. Having a Google account with the range of tools and services available to publishers (and businesses) is really a must for any sized business. It doesn’t mean you need a premium package of business services, much less an active social account on Google +. However, going through the steps to verify your business page, and maintaining the same address and contact information is the bare minimum that Google expects.

3. Go Mobile
Hummingbird starts with mobile searches, but it doesn’t finish there. For good reason, getting your own site up to speed on meeting the needs of mobile searches should benefit you even for old-fashioned desktop searching. Because mobile searching has been such an important boon to over all search traffic, it’s also a good indicator (to Google anyway) as to how with it your site really is. There is essentially no business or website model that can afford to simply ignore the mobile search market. So, make sure your site, photos and all, can easily be loaded and navigated on a smart phone, even if you’re selling just desk-top computers or desks, for that matter.

4. Page Load Times
Many webmasters will handle page-load time along with setting up a responsive “mobile friendly.” Processes are similar, and the intent is similar too. If your site is simply too heavy, especially in regards to the sizes of images, Google’s Hummingbird probably won’t pass along their good favor to you. But a good webmaster will also experiment and repair all of the possible variables that could be slowing down your web-pages from loading. Plug-ins on any number of platforms are a likely culprit, but be sure to look into everything that could possibly be slowing your pages down and address them.

5. Structured Data
Lamentably, getting a little more technically sophisticated is probably on the agenda for just about anyone hoping to get a little more oomph from their online marketing.  Stating it simply, just as micro-data markup has become more standardized for your web page’s authors, that same mark up is quickly seeping into all other areas of online content.

Speak to your webmaster, or to us, about better embedding micro-data tags into you site content. That can mean identifying products with “rich snippets” or similarly, identifying the services and other useful information to search visitors, both on the search results page, and in the mobile device they’re likely coming from.

Like in many things, the more Google and the other search engines know, the better off you’ll end up doing.

Rizwan Ahmad
Rizwan Ahmad

Rizwan is an avid mobile geek and a gaming lover. He loves to keep a tab on new tech and loves to share the latest tech news and reviews on Smartphones, Gadgets, Apps, and more.

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