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submitted: 2008-04-14 18:31:24 | by: NoelSwanson
Total views: 104 | Word Count: 693 | |

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.

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" and "White Hat".

White Hat refers to strategies that work with the search engines - to deliver quality, relevant, accurate, timely information.

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.

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. Quality themed content, and lots of it. This goes beyond just stuffing in your keywords as much as possible. The SE's are getting better at determining themes by means of "latent semantic indexing", which basically means using artificial intelligence to work out what the site is about, rather than just what keywords are on it. To achieve this you need to provide your keyword, certainly, and also other words and phrases that are linked to them.

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. 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 key in rising 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.

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