How is it done?

Without all the myths, hype and nonsense, you can develop a logical strategy to promote your website.

First of all, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?

Search Engines are out to deliver the most current, relevant and accurate information to the public. They do this by using top secret algorithms for site rankings. Therefore, they are at constant war with SEO experts, whose goal is to ensure the top is dominated by their clients.

Top rankings can be achieved by two “strategies”:

“Black Hat Optimization” and “White Hat Optimization”

White Hat refers to strategies that work with the search engines – to deliver quality, relevant, accurate, timely information.

Black Hat techniques are ways of cheating that manipulate loopholes and other cheating techniques. These techniques do have the potential to work but do not last for very long as Google programmers are quick to fix the loopholes and ban you at the same time.

There are certain strategies that have been proven to work, have survived the test of time, and make sense for raising ranking factors, thus furthering the goal of the Search Engines:

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. Incoming Links. Links from “bad neighborhoods” get you very little in the way of Google Page Rank. These links from Free-For-All (FFA) sites and link farms are not very well looked upon. Though Google does not penalize you for such incoming links, they definitely do not reward you for such. Links from authority sites, on the other hand, are worth quite a bit. Theme related sites are also quite worthy, ie if you have a computer gaming site, other gaming sites linking to you will be worth more than a website for household cleaners. To see how valuable a site roughly is in relation to others, see it’s Google Page Rank, the higher it is, the more valuable the site. Eventually, Google Page Rank will probably become specific to themes, meaning you could be ranked highly for one theme and rather low for another.

3. Old sites – ie that have been around for a long time are worth more than new ones – in general your PR will rise with time, all other factors being equal.

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. Outgoing links – Too many links can be a bad thing, especially when linking to bad neighborhoods. Though bad links coming in are not penalized, ones going out certainly are. Links out to authority sites are quite worthwhile.

6. Content words or keywords, as they are commonly known. Though they vary in how competitive they are, the best bet is to aim for your most focused keywords before the broader ones. For local business owners, try adding your local area name to your keywords.

7. Unique content. This is the key to both pages that link to you and your own site itself. Search Engine’s are out to deliver original content; no one wants to see multiple pages of the same information. The most common way of people letting all their hard work go to waste is to copy the same pages everyone else is using. Search Engines are quick to filter out duplicate content.