Monday, 09 July - 13:33 Category: SEO

The 1st Step in Search Engine Optimising Your Site...

SYNOPSIS: Forget the fancy tricks and black-hat approaches, the best way to get on to the search engine ladder and improve your ranking is with lots of regularly updated, great content that your Browser will love.

Let me begin with a quick history lesson

You may remember (back in the dark ages of the Internet) you would type in an innocuous search like “dvd player” and be inundated with porn sites in the results. This was because of a simple technique web designers were using which was to ‘spam’ the page with keywords (so when you looked at the code that made up the page you would see “dvd player” listed fifty times. This was because the search engines were largely basing their results on the number of times a keyword repeated itself as a guide to how relevant the page was. It was just carte blanch for every unscrupulous website owner to force their way into listings that simply weren’t relevant. Things needed to be done and the Search Engines reacted by introducing (over the next few years) all kinds of criteria to determine the true relevance of pages. And guess what? They never told us what the criteria were. Obviously, because they didn’t want a repeat of the early days. Their whole business is predicated on the user getting what they expect. It was the perceived absence of relevance that killed off HotBot, Excite, and to a degree, Yahoo. It’s also what jettisoned Google to becoming the most popular website on the planet.

Now a lot is written about how Google ranks sites and yet very little is truly known. Naturally, they don’t want us to know – that would be fatal. As soon as technologists know the inner workings the sooner they’ll find loopholes, means of circumventing the system and we’ll be back to square one.

So, where do you begin if you want to get a decent ranking in Google?

I think that it has pretty much been accepted these days that if you want to get to the top of Google (and let’s face it everybody does) then produce highly relevant copy and lots of it. That’s your starting point. Forget magic bullet solutions and ignore the promises of companies who “guarantee” positions. (In fact, that’s your signal to run like hell!)

So, that’s the bad news – and here it is again – write lots of relevant copy! This leads me on to an interesting problem I’ll tackle in the next blog about how to motivate yourself to write. The more content on your site the more Google will raise the quality score of the site. If you have just a few pages you’ll be seen to be a really limited resource and consequently your browser isn’t going to get great information from your site (because there’s not much to get!).

Think of your website as a planet. The bigger the planet the more gravity it will have (the more traffic it will attract). If you website is the size of a coffee cup you’re not going to attract much attention but if you’re the size of the Moon you’ll get noticed.

The deal is that whilst there are techniques and approaches you can take to enhance your postion that is incremental compared with having a site packed with lots of great content which will be of real help to your browser.

Go forth and write…

And just in case you’d like to know… this link explains how you can handle Search Engine Optimisation on Google's Site.

Find out more about how you can radically improve your search engine rankings

Posted By:Jed Wylie on Mon, May 5th 2008, 13:33