Getting Ranked in Google

Once you have created your web site you need to get Ranked by Google and the other search engines, and more importantly, ranked highly in Google and the Search Engine Result Positions SERPs.  Search engine optimization (SEO) has been compared to an art form, and while it is true that due to the changing ranking algorithms of Google and the major search engines it is not an exact science, but there are some tried and tested methods which will help you towards that coveted first page position.

We will first look at on site SEO, and then move onto external factors such as in links and social bookmarking.

Google will tell you that content is king, that if you build a great site that people find, informative, remarkable, useful or just plain funny then people will link to you, this is  very true, but it doesn’t hurt – infact it helps immeasurably if that content is optimized for the specific keywords you are targeting.  You need to be careful not to spam the search engines as this will get you penalized, so a healthy key word concentration of between 2.5 – 6% should be enough to let the search engines know what your site is about with out compromising your visitors experience.

So choose your keywords and use them well within your content , make sure you make proper use of header1 and header2 tags as the engines place more weight on keywords contained within header tags, you should not however put the whole page within the header1 tag as this will annul the effect.

Once you have optimized your content it is time to look at your meta data:

1. Make sure your keywords are in your title.
2. Make sure your key words are well used in your description.
3. Make sure your keywords are in your keywords section.

The really important one here is the title, rumors abound of the engines ignoring keywords, and description metadata, but since your meta description will be displayed in the listings along with the title it is worth including yor keywords anyway as this will show your relevance to the web surfer.

The next thing to look at is your URLs many content management systems such as Blogging software naturally creates dynamic URLs, by this I mean something along the lines of index.php?Type=0&x=5&y=0.1&z=1&submit=search, this tells the search engines nothing about your site, your pages will still get spidered, but you lose an important place to position another key word, fortunately most content management systems have plugins available to rewrite your URLs to a more Search Engine Friendly URL of your choosing.

Once you have your page optimized it is time to get into the world of links, be prepared to spend a lot of time thinking about links because they are one of the most important ways that an engine will decide on the trustworthyness of your site, links if they are dofollow will channel page rank from the originating website to yours, the more important that website is the more importance yours gains from being linked to from it.  If the site is relevant to your topic you will also get bonus points for relevant content, and even better the anchor text of these links should contain your keywords

So get as many links as you can, try to go for relevant on topic sites, try to have those links embedded within relevant text on the page of the donor. There are many ways of getting in links but the most tried and tested and cheapest is through the publication of high quality relevant articles which contain your anchor text links.  These article are then published to article directories and syndicated to as many other web authors as possible.