How do I do it?
Here we will help you develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website by weeding out all of the nonsense, myths and hype.
First things first, how does a website achieve top rankings?
The reality is that all the search engines use their own, top secret, algorithms to rank sites. Their goal is to deliver relevant, accurate, and up-to-date information to their searching public. To achieve this, they are in a constant war against SEO experts who would seek to skew those rankings so as to put their clients at the top.
Top rankings can be achieved by two "strategies":
"Black Hat Strategies" and "White Hat Strategies"
White Hat strategies deliver relevant, accurate, quality and timely information to help reinforce Search Engine design.
Black Hat refers to strategies that try to get around that by various ways of cheating. Black Hat techniques can work, but usually only for a short period of time until all the PhD’s at Google figure out what you are doing and find a way to plug that loophole - and ban you while they are at it.
No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:
1. Well thought out content that relates to your theme. The more the better. Search Engines are getting better at interpreting sites though a process called "latent semantic indexing" with is a more complex way of saying that artificial intelligence is being used to determine what the site is about, as opposed to simple what keywords are within. Littering the site with as many keywords as possible simply doesn’t work anymore. Keywords are still required but now also require other phrases and words that are related to your topic keywords.
2. Links pointing to your site. Links coming from Authority sites are generally worth th
e most, as they are trusted sources of content. Links from so-called "bad neighborhoods" count for very little. Theme sites related to yours are worth more than non-related sites, ie political sites won’t help you nearly as much as a pet site if you are likewise, a pet site. Search Engines don’t penalize you for bad links coming into your site, but they certainly don’t reward you for links from Free-For-All pages (FFA), link farms or other sites dubbed "bad." Google Page Rank is a good rough indication of how valuable a site is, the higher the better. PR is probably going to become theme specific, meaning that you may have a low PR for one theme but have a high PR for another theme.
3. Sites that have been around a long time - If all factors are equal, Google Page Rank will rise with time. This makes older sites more worthwhile due to this reason.
4. New sites are also worthy - remember, the SE’s want to deliver hot news, so they will give an initial priority to new sites, and also to new links pointing to sites, as they might indicate that there is some hot, recent, news on that site.
5. Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But don’t have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
6. The keywords themselves - obviously some keywords are a lot more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific keywords first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the keyword.
7. Unique content. The last thing that search engines want to do is to deliver to the public 20,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is quickly recognized and filtered out by the SE’s. Don’t just slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You need unique content. That applies both to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.
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