How do I do it?
Without all the myths, hype and nonsense, you can develop a logical strategy to promote your website.
First things first, how does a website achieve top 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” and “White Hat”.
White Hat strategies deliver relevant, accurate, quality and timely information to help reinforce Search Engine design.
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.
No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:
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. 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. 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. Original Content. Don’t just use the same article everyone else is using. Search Engines are quick to filter out content that they find multiple times. One needs unique content, both on sites linking in, as well as your own. Search Engine’s don’t want the public to find the same information in multiple places.
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