10 facts about Google that beginners don't know or understandUnderstanding how Google works can be a challenge so here are ten facts about Google that may help you understand it better.

These ten facts about Google are just some of the things I’ve learnt about Google while working in SEO for the last 18 years.

1. Your new website is not going to immediately appear in Google. Even if your web designer has done everything right it could still take anything up to a year or more for your website to appear.

2. Google is under no obligation to list your website at all.

3. If Google does choose to list your website, it will rank it against a complex set of factors that are mostly kept secret.

4. Even when your website does start to appear in Google it is not going to result in a deluge of new customers. There may not be that many potential customers searching for your service or product.

5. Google adjusts that set of ranking factors mentioned in point 3 on an almost daily basis so there is no guarantee that, if you have achieved a good ranking, you will retain it.

6. Google will look for mentions of your business in other places besides your website. It will look for links to your website, talk about your website from satisfied customers, mentions in newspapers and other places too.

7. No website should be ‘set and forget’. In many industry verticals Google seems to pay more attention to websites that update frequently.

8. We mere mortals have no guaranteed control over where, when, or what page of our website appears in Google.

9. Google sets the rules and if you try to bend or break those rules Google will punish you and may go so far as to drop your site from its listings.

10. Anyone who claims to have the ‘secret sauce’ to be able to achieve top of first-page listings in Google for your website is telling lies.

Three more facts about Google.

1. Any attempt to improve your rankings will be expensive, it will take a long time and there are no guarantees that the attempt will work. The cost of hiring a reputable search engine optimisation business can be as high as $40,000.

2. A good listing in Google is much harder to achieve for an e-commerce site.

3. Never rely on Google when it comes to the success of your business. Those small businesses that do often fail.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate to contact us here at Total Website Management. We are always prepared to help you with basic SEO advice.