How to climb to the top of Google - An overview of effective SEO via link popularity

Everyone wants to get to the top of the search engines, right?

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.

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 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. 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. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don't have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.

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. 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.

Read about effective link building in Step 2 here.