Optimization For Google - Climbing To The Top Of Rankings
How do you do it?
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?
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.
There are two “strategies” for getting 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 techniques are ways of cheating that manipulate loopholes and other cheating techniques. These techniques do have the potential to work but do not last for very long as Google programmers are quick to fix the loopholes and ban you at the same time.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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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