SEO and the first page of Google
There seems to be a huge amount of information on the internet about how to rank highly in Google. The obvious reason for this is that a listing at the top of the returned results for certain keywords or keyphrases, means traffic, and traffic means good news all round. People make search engine optimisation out as if there is some magical art form which only the skilled and highly trained (and therefore highly paid) can achieve. This however is really not the case at all, and a few simple steps can be taken to improve the ranking of your web page or web site. The first is to look at what Google says to do to get listed. Submit a sitemap to google, through the Google webmasters section, this allows the google spiders to crawl your website easily and for your pages to be listed (although there is no guarantee of a listing). Next, if you have written the content of your webpages yourself and it is original, this is good news, duplicated content is frowned upon and will not help you get ranked well in google. By duplicate content, I believe roughly 60% of the webpage should be original material in order to avoid the issue.
Next, is your page interesting and informative, well written and easy on the eye? If it is then people will want to link to your page. This form of organic linking from web page to web page is the best available as you have to do nothing except write the excellent content and watch the links roll in. A link to your site is essentially a vote from the internet that your site contains something interesting. The more votes the higher you rank. Links, ideally, should be one way (incoming to your site) rather than reciprocal (although reciprocal links are helpful too). The links to your site should contain within the anchor text, the keywords or keyphrases that you are trying to rank highly for, the “vote” for your site, then shows what it is “voting” for. The keywords you are trying to rank for should ideally be listed in your html header, and in the body of your text.
How to build links to your site…
Waiting for your “organic” links to grow because of your amazing web content is not exactly a quick or guaranteed process. You can usually build reciprocal links by contacting other webmasters and exchanging links, this can be difficult as webmasters usually only want to link to sites that are relevant to their pages, and if you are a competitor, it hardly makes sense to help build your competitions web page popularity. It is time consuming, but reciprocal links are definitely worth it. Next, you can find web pages that allow you to post a response and a link to your site, those using the “no follow” html should be avoided. This is a good way to build one way links, but write a decent response, some good content, or your post will be deleted as spam and the effort is futile. Another great way is to submit articles to online submission services, where webmasters looking for content can post your article on their site in return for a link back to your site. A good article, if used by enough webmasters, can be a fantastic link boost to your site and have your google rankings boosted in very little time. http://ezinearticles.com
Not all “votes” are equal. A link to your site from a site that ranks highly in google itself, from it’s own popularity, will be better for improving your ranking than an obscure site that is linked to by nobody. Paid links are frowned upon by Google, who recently downgraded page ranks of websites offering such services, high page rank being their currency, this obviously has hurt their business model, but the buyers of links remain unaffected, controversial area, but if google penalised the buyers of links and downgraded their ranking, you can guarantee the competition would be buying links to your site in order to reduce your ranking.
There are also services offering 3 way links, if 3 or more websites are in agreement, one unique link in to your webpage can be created for all parties involved, I guess it’s kind of removing the reciprocal link problem, and repeated many times over as the linked service above offers it can really help you rank well.
Finding a good source of information on SEO without paying through the nose is not easy amongst the pile of confusing and misleading information out there, someone I find who seems to review well and offer an honest opinion is Jonathan Leger, I recommend what he has to say on the matter.
At the moment, I have done nothing to optimise this site in any of the ways described above, whatsoever. It’s only been up a month and, well, I’ve been busy. BUT I resolve to start doing so and will let you know the results in terms of increased traffic in the weeks and months to come.