Google Optimization - So You Want To Get To The Top?
How do I do it?
Here we will help you develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website by weeding out all of the nonsense, myths and hype.
First of all, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?
Search Engines are out to deliver the most current, relevant and accurate information to the public. They do this by using top secret algorithms for site rankings. Therefore, they are at constant war with SEO experts, whose goal is to ensure the top is dominated by their clients.
Top rankings can be achieved by two “strategies”:
“Black Hat Strategies” and “White Hat Strategies”
White Hat strategies deliver relevant, accurate, quality and timely information to help reinforce Search Engine design.
Black hat goes against the Search Engines by cheating and exploiting loopholes. These strategies can work but are only effective for a short time until the programmers at Google find out what you are doing, ban you and fix that loophole.
No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:
1. Quality themed content, and lots of it. This goes beyond just stuffing in your keywords as much as possible. The SE’s are getting better at determining themes by means of “latent semantic indexing”, which basically means using artificial intelligence to work out what the site is about, rather than just what keywords are on it. To achieve this you need to provide your keyword, certainly, and also other words and phrases that are linked to them.
2. Links pointing to your site. Links coming from Authority sites are generally worth the most, as they are trusted sources of content. Links from so-called “bad neighborhoods” count for very little. Theme sites related to yours are worth more than non-related sites, ie political sites won’t help you nearly as much as a pet site if you are likewise, a pet site. Search Engines don’t penalize you for bad links coming into your site, but they certainly don’t reward you for links from Free-For-All pages (FFA), link farms or other sites dubbed “bad.” Google Page Rank is a good rough indication of how valuable a site is, the higher the better. PR is probably going to become theme specific, meaning that you may have a low PR for one theme but have a high PR for another theme.
3. Sites that are older -PR generally rises in time if all factors are equal. Sites that have been around for longer are more valuable than new ones due to this.
4. Fresh sites - In the Search Engine’s quest to find hot news, they generally look to new sites and therefore give initial priority to the newer sites. SE’s also look for links pointing to these new sites as they are sometimes a stepping stone to other new content.
5. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don’t have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
6. Keywords - Set your goal to get ranked for specific keywords before all else. Tag the name of your area or town to the end of the keyword if you are a local business. Keywords vary in competition. Some much more than others.
7. Original Content. Don’t just use the same article everyone else is using. Search Engines are quick to filter out content that they find multiple times. One needs unique content, both on sites linking in, as well as your own. Search Engine’s don’t want the public to find the same information in multiple places.
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