Website SEO and Google

Getting a new web-page, or indeed a whole new website, listed in Google is not that difficult. Just create a Hub including a link to your home page or site map, for example, and the Googlebot will find your site. However, getting your site's pages to rank highly for a given keyword search is completely another. Achieving this is probably the principal objective for anyone involved with promoting an application on the world wide web.

The first and foremost rule you need to understand is that this is not a hard science. If you consider that Google tweaked its search algorithym over 400 times in 2007 (this was confimed by Google) you should appreciate that the Google index is a moving target. There are over 100 criteria used in the sophisticated ranking algorithym used by Google to calculate a web page's rank, and all have their own weighting factor. These weightings, amongst other variables in the algorithym, are (so many SEO professionals believe) constantly in flux. This is just one of the reasons why a page that ranked well one day suddenly moves off the first page of results the next.

My day job is as an SEO consultant to a large publishing company and I thought I might share some of my knowledge with you. This will be the first in a series of hubs I shall be writing specifically aimed at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Google. I will highlight the tools and techniques at your disposal to help your site's pages gain a good chance at getting listed and ranked. Some important points to keep in mind, when reading any hubs in this series:

remember that Google ranks pages not sites. When you run a search in Google you are provided with a list of results, each of which point to an individual page or document. This is an important concept to keep in mind when reading about Rank and PageRank

Articles Im intending to provide as part of this series: