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.
Top rankings can be achieved by two "strategies":
"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 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. Well thought out content that relates to your theme. The more the better. Search Engines are getting better at interpreting sites though a process called "latent semantic indexing" with is a more complex way of saying that artificial intelligence is being used to determine what the site is about, as opposed to simple what keywords are within. Littering the site with as many keywords as possible simply doesn't work anymore. Keywords are still required but now also require other phrases and words that are related to your topic keywords.
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 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. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don't have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
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.
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.
Top rankings can be achieved by two "strategies":
"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 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. Well thought out content that relates to your theme. The more the better. Search Engines are getting better at interpreting sites though a process called "latent semantic indexing" with is a more complex way of saying that artificial intelligence is being used to determine what the site is about, as opposed to simple what keywords are within. Littering the site with as many keywords as possible simply doesn't work anymore. Keywords are still required but now also require other phrases and words that are related to your topic keywords.
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 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. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don't have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
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 suggests the use of an article submission service, which can be key in climbing to the top of Google Rankings. These services can help you submit articles to thousands of article directories; much more than you could do by hand.
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