Search Engine Optimization is Straight Forward - Just Think like a Human

In my view the whole search engine optimization thing is really pretty straight forward.  When I use the word “Google” I will be generally referring to the big search engines as well.

Google is trying to provide the searcher, a human, with the highest quality search results; results that accurately reflect the topic of the keywords used in the search. 

To do this Google has to think like a human as much as possible.  Some of the things that influence Google are the title and other meta-tags, the number of pages a site has, the relatedness of the pages, the text on the pages, headings, picture alt descriptions, internal linking structure, spelling and grammar etc. Google even looks at how cluttered a page is, how many ads appear on it and where they appear.

Google has the ability to find relationships between related words. For instance, if you had a website about shoes, then you should have pages about sneakers, and slippers, and even socks.  Google can detect those relationships and use them to help determine the importance of your site.

Google also analyzes the links pointing to your site from other sites. Incoming links are very important since there will be a large number of quality sites competing with you for the top page on the search results. Ties in site importance go to the one with the best link score. Google looks at a number of elements involved with the link to determine how important the link is, and how relevant to the keyword phrase.

Google examines the anchor text, the link text, the destination URL in the link, the text around the link on the page, the topic and quality of the page the link is on, the same for the website the page is on, and obviously the total number of links that point to your site.

It even examines the order and location of the words within the element such as anchor text. The closer to the beginning the more weight the keyword phrases have.

Google loves text.  Google does not see images. There are a number of factors Google uses to analyze the body text on your pages.  These include the keyword density, the keyword location within an element, headings, spelling, grammar etc. 

There is nothing magic about it, just spoon feed Google the information it is looking for. Pretend you are creating your site for humans. Google wants good SEO for your site.  Google even provides tools to help you optimize your site and plenty of good tips.

None of the above is worth anything if Google doesn’t index your pages. There is no excuse for not getting your pages indexed. Google tells you exactly how to do it, and leans over backwards to help you. Hint: create and submit a sitemap.

You should have a strategic plan for getting higher rankings in the search engines that includes a linking strategy to obtain incoming links. Incoming links are hugely important. High quality content will induce other sites to link to you, and make it much easier for you to obtain incoming links by trading with appropriate sites.

The more pages the better.  As a human which site would you deem more important, a 20 page site, or a 200 page site?

There is an abundance of information about how to handle the on page details of optimization such as the meta tags, title tags, body text etc. Use that information to optimize and organize the information you have.

Promote your site using social media such as twitter and Facebook and by writing articles for publishing in article directories which will build your links as well as bringing you traffic.

That’s all you need to do in the way of search engine optimization to drive your site to the top of the rankings.