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.

Firstly, what places a site in the higher 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.

There are two “strategies” for getting top rankings:

“Black Hat Optimization” and “White Hat Optimization”

White Hat strategies deliver relevant, accurate, quality and timely information to help reinforce Search Engine design.

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.

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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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.

About the Author:

Noel Swanson recommends using an article submission service, which will be crucial in climbing to the top of Google Rankings. These services will help you submit articles to thousands of article directories; much more than you could do manually.

by Noel Swanson

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 2:15 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.