Google Optimization - So You Want To Get To The Top?
March 31st, 2008 by
Darren Warmuth
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How do you 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?
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” and “White Hat”.
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.
Though nobody can verify what works best as far as ranking factors. Given the goal of Search Engines, there are a handful of strategies that have survived the test of time, make logical sense, and have been physically proven:
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 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. 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. 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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