Google Optimization - So You Want To Get To The Top?
Noel Swanson
How is it done?
Without all the myths, hype and nonsense, you can develop a logical strategy to promote your website.
First of all, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?
The reality is that all the search engines use their own, top secret, algorithms to rank sites. Their goal is to deliver relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information to their searching public. To achieve this, they are in a constant war against SEO experts who would seek to skew those rankings so as to put their clients at the top.
Two "strategies" can be applied to get into the top rankings:
"Black Hat Optimization" and "White Hat Optimization"
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. Incoming Links. Links from "bad neighborhoods" get you very little in the way of Google Page Rank. These links from Free-For-All (FFA) sites and link farms are not very well looked upon. Though Google does not penalize you for such incoming links, they definitely do not reward you for such. Links from authority sites, on the other hand, are worth quite a bit. Theme related sites are also quite worthy, ie if you have a computer gaming site, other gaming sites linking to you will be worth more than a website for household cleaners. To see how valuable a site roughly is in relation to others, see it's Google Page Rank, the higher it is, the more valuable the site. Eventually, Google Page Rank will probably become specific to themes, meaning you could be ranked highly for one theme and rather low for another.
3. Old sites - ie that have been around for a long time are worth more than new ones - in general your PR will rise with time, all other factors being equal.
4. New sites - New sites generally get initial priority as they may have some recent, hot news, which is after all what Search Engine's are looking to deliver. Links pointing to new sites are also worthwhile as they may indicate recent news on the site being linked to.
5. Outgoing links - Too many links can be a bad thing, especially when linking to bad neighborhoods. Though bad links coming in are not penalized, ones going out certainly are. Links out to authority sites are quite worthwhile.
6. Content words or keywords, as they are commonly known. Though they vary in how competitive they are, the best bet is to aim for your most focused keywords before the broader ones. For local business owners, try adding your local area name to your keywords.
7. Unique content. This is the key to both pages that link to you and your own site itself. Search Engine's are out to deliver original content; no one wants to see multiple pages of the same information. The most common way of people letting all their hard work go to waste is to copy the same pages everyone else is using. Search Engines are quick to filter out duplicate content.
About the Author:
Noel Swanson suggests the use of an article submission service, which can be crucial in climbing to the top of Google Rankings. These services can help you submit articles to thousands of article directories; much more than you could do by hand.
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