Optimize For Google - Getting To The Top Of The Search Engines
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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?
Search Engines are out to deliver the most current, relevant and accurate information to the public. They do this by using top secret algorithms for site rankings. Therefore, they are at constant war with SEO experts, whose goal is to ensure the top is dominated by their clients.
Top rankings can be achieved by two “strategies”:
“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 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 to your site. In general, the more the merrier. But not all links are created equal. Links on themed sites are worth more than on pages that are not related to your theme, ie links to your fishing site from another fishing site are worth more than if they come from a cooking site. Links from “bad neighborhoods” count for nothing. They don’t penalize you for other people linking to you, but they certainly don’t reward you for links coming from link farms, Free-For-All pages (FFA), and any other sites they consider to be bad. Links from “authority sites” are worth more. Some indication of a site’s value is given by the Google Page Rank - the higher the better. In time, the Page Rank will probably become theme specific - ie your site could have a high PR for one theme, and a low one 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. 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.
March 20th, 2008 - Posted in Online Marketing | |
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on March 20th, 2008 at 4:01 am
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on March 27th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
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