Google Optimization – So You Want To Get To The Top?
How is it done?
What I want to do here is to strip out all the nonsense, myths and hype that is out there so that you can develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website.
Firstly, what places a site in the higher rankings?
Through use of top secret algorithms, Search Engines rank sites based on relevancy, accuracy and up-kept status of information. This counters SEO experts whose sole purpose is to get clients at the top of the rankings.
Two “strategies” can be applied to get into the top rankings:
“Black Hat Strategies” and “White Hat Strategies”
White Hat optimization is designed to deliver accurate, timely, relevant and quality information – essentially working WITH the Search Engines.
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.
There are certain strategies that have been proven to work, have survived the test of time, and make sense for raising ranking factors, thus furthering the goal of the Search Engines:
1. High quality content relevant to your theme. The more content present on a site, the better it will be recognized. Search engines use AI programs known as “latent semantic indexing” programs to decipher what websites are about, as opposed to just what keywords are within the content. Keywords still play a vital role but now other content that relates to your theme is also relevant as it is now taken into account by the artificial intelligence.
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 have been around a long time – If all factors are equal, Google Page Rank will rise with time. This makes older sites more worthwhile due to this reason.
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. Outbound links are quite worthwhile, especially when linking to expert sites. A word of caution though, do not have too many links and do not link to bad neighborhoods as you can be penalized for it, as opposed to incoming links, which you can not.
6. The keywords themselves – obviously some keywords are a lot more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific keywords first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the keyword.
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.
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