Optimize For Google - Getting To The Top Of The Search Engines | Article Marketing

By NoelSwanson
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How is it done?

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?

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.

There are two "strategies" for getting 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 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. 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. 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. The keywords themselves - obviously some keywords are a lot more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific keywords first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the keyword.

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 the use of an article submission service, which can be crucial in rising to the top of Google Rankings. These services can help you submit articles to thousands of article directories; much more than you could do manually.

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