by Noel Swanson

How do I 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?

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.

Two “strategies” can be applied to get into the top rankings:

“Black Hat Optimization” and “White Hat Optimization”

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 crucial 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.

Tagged with: