SEO and how to be #1 in Google and MSN!

Current Positions At the time of writing my site ranks for the term 'website hacking' (no quotes needed): MSN: 1st and 2nd Google: 3rd

Introduction The web started out as one big irrelevant mass of pages, you would have to guess URLs or remember all of them! Then along came the first search engines, these relied on manual submissions from webmasters and so developed slowly, then along came search engine spiders. As soon as these search engines were "crawling" or "spidering" thousands of pages, people immediately saw this as an opportunity to help people boost their search engine rankings. Unfortunately, as I shall show you throughout the article, not everybody goes about this business in the right way.

Relevancy The key to a good search engine ranking is relevancy, is your website relevant to the search terms you are targeting? Many times clients have wanted to be listed for terms which have nothing to do with their website. One notable example was a client who wanted to be #1 ranked for the phrase: "online clothing" when he was in fact selling deodorants and antiperspirants. Even if he made his ranking the visitors would not be interested in his product!

Competition & Keyword Choice The second thing to look out for is competition, the "keyword modifier" or second keyword can make all the difference, rather than "games", try "board games", rather than "parties", try "birthday parties". Not only will you get more relevant visitors but you will also find it easier to get top listings as the competition is not so great.

Link Exchanges Do not go about this the wrong away. As you can read in a recent article by Mike Banks Valentine (http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2004/nov/25.html) you can ruin your chances if you employ bad tactics or do not research your "friends" thoroughly. I rarely accept people into a link exchange - they must have a PR or 4 or higher, they must not employ bad SEO tactics and they must have good original content, because otherwise my sites could be penalised for the bad work of others. I also cross-check their name across black-lists to see if they have already been caught doing something wrong.

Doorway Pages Never ever use doorway pages. I recently saw a piece of doorway page generation software which was free and which claimed to be compliant to search engine guidelines. As the very notion of doorway pages is despised by all search engines this is impossible. Do not use them as they can only do harm.

However, as many are sceptical of whether or not this is true, I ran a recent experiment: I optimized my site for the search engines using the strategies above and at the same time as launching this site I launched an identical one on a URL I cannot publish. I used 1000 doorway pages generated automatically and pointed them to the main page from the same domain. With the first domain Google sends me hundreds of visitors a day, while the second example with the doorway pages is nowhere in the results, probably banned, for employing "black hat" SEO techniques.

Conclusion The moral of the day is simple, do not try and work around the search engines, work with them. Concentrate on relevancy, keyword choice and link exchanges, as these are the only ways you can legitimately get a top search engine ranking. Remember, content is King and relevance is Queen, there is no point having good content and irrelevant keywords and vice-versa, only aim for what can be achieved, watch your competition and be an honest SEO.