By Noel Swanson
How is it done?
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?
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.
There are two "strategies" for getting top rankings:
"Black Hat Strategies" and "White Hat Strategies"
White Hat refers to strategies that work with the search engines - to deliver quality, relevant, accurate, timely information.
Black Hat refers to strategies that try to get around that by various ways of cheating. Black Hat techniques can work, but usually only for a short period of time until all the PhD's at Google figure out what you are doing and find a way to plug that loophole - and ban you while they are at it.
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. 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 are also worthy - remember, the SE's want to deliver hot news, so they will give an initial priority to new sites, and also to new links pointing to sites, as they might indicate that there is some hot, recent, news on that site.
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. Unique content. The last thing that search engines want to do is to deliver to the public 20,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is quickly recognized and filtered out by the SE's. Don't just slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You need unique content. That applies both to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.
About the Author:
Noel Swanson recommends the use of an article submission service, which can be key in rising to the top of Google Rankings. These services can help you submit articles to thousands of article directories; much more than you could do manually.
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