As a webmaster since before Google was a sparkle in Larry Page or Sergey Brin's eye, I have had the opportunity to watch Google grow into the monster it is today from the view point of the webmaster not just the user that is looking for the best place to buy his or her mother some flowers.

Over the years I had the privilege of helping dozen maybe even hundreds of people get better traffic from Google.

I will try basic explain some basic rules that while an experienced user already know a beginner may not.

1. Google can not read an image. I have seen many websites put there text onto a image then call me asking my why they never seem to get decent traffic form Google. For those experienced users that are shouting what about ALT tags...yea wonderful they can read ALT tags but are not valued near as high as text, so let no confuse the issue. Use text simple sweet and proven.
2. Key word Spamming this was once almost the black death of search engines. Years ago you you could just put a series of words in a text block at the bottom of the page and soon you had all kinds of traffic for the word you repeated 50 times. Thank god this no longer works. I could go on for hours on how to phrase your text to get the most from your desired key words. I simple method to use is never use the same word more then 3 percent of the time. If you don't have a software that can count these words for you you can use page http://www.ispmanager.net/density.php put in the URL of your page, if you get over 3% under "density in body text" reword it.
3. Work toward a realistic result. Lets say for example you are a real estate agent in Pulaski Tennessee. and you have a real estate site, that make sense. I have had more then one person ask me make it their site come up in the top spot for the term “Real Estate” . That's real nice and I am waiting for the government to send me my bail out money in the mail also. Google ranks site by a complex scoring system that counts links to your site. It goes into much more detail then just this if the sites that link to you are also in the real estate they hold a much higher value then sites that are not related to real estate. With this system in place it pretty much kills your chances to get top billing for the term real estate since the mega real estate site will end up on top for that term. Do not fall for sites that claim they get you the top listing for you. Many of these site simply put up gateway pages. This system while sometime works for a brief time is prohibited on most major Internet search engines and will get you banned in the long run. Work toward more specific terms like “Pulaski real estate” or “Giles County real estate.” Now instead of competing against mega giants few number of companies. Sure if you got top billing for the term “Real Estate” your traffic would be much greater but its not going to happen. It is better to get top billing for a term that might get 100 search per day then get listed on page 52,912,222 of the search result and never ever get a hit from it.
4. Every page of your website can be designed to attract different keywords. Just because the front page of your site is designed to target “Pulaski Tennessee real estate” not every page of you website has to target the same key words. Much like the Blog site you are reading this page at each page can be list separately in Google based on the content of the page itself.
5. Google wants content the more words the more Google will read. If you put up a one sentence article it will index all 9 words, and if you are lucky you will get a hit or 2 a year.
6. Duplicate content. Do not post the same article on more then one page of your website or external sites. Google will lower your rank or even in some cases ban you site. Now in the past I have seen this happen when someone else copies your content, if this happens go to http://www.google.com/dmca.html and inform Google of the site that infringing on your copyright.
7. Chose your link partners carefully. Do not buy links to increase ranking artificially. Before linking to a site make sure it is not banned by Google. You can Search Google with this “site:site_you_want_to_link_to.com” If nothing comes up do not link to it. There are link exchanges that state they are to improve you Google ranking DO NOT USE THEM.

For those that are reading this and I expect a good number of you that will read it are from Hub Pages just use good writing techniques, with real content that is of interest and value to the people you want to read it. Stay on topic with keywords, and most of all don't write article that are designed to attract Mr Google Bot, write articles that the reader wants to read, in the long run you will get much better traffic that is interested in what you are offering. An interested reader has a much better chance to buy something you have advertised . Not only are they happy often they will show your article to other people that are also interested in the subject.

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