Optimize For Google – Getting To The Top Of The Search Engines
Posted on: April 29, 2008
Posted in: Membership Sites
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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?
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 Optimization” and “White Hat Optimization”
White Hat refers to strategies that work with the search engines – to deliver quality, relevant, accurate, timely information.
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. 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. 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 are older -PR generally rises in time if all factors are equal. Sites that have been around for longer are more valuable than new ones due to this.
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. 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.