The Most Important Ways to Rank in Google
Google uses many different attributes to determine where a website appears in its search engine results. No one really knows for sure what those attributes are. But, with some time and testing, you can get a small idea of what Google wants to see.
What Not To Do.
I can say, from first hand experience, you do not want to cloak your website. This will get you banned. Now, you may be asking, “What is Cloaking?”
Cloaking.
Cloaking is sending one page of HTML to your users and another page of HTML to the Google spider. The purpose of this is to maximize factors you believe Google wants to see and showing it to the spider. However, these factors may leave you with an unpopular (and unprofitable) page with your users. So, you send a different HTML page to visitors to your website.
For a search engine, cloaking can be very difficult to detect. Usually, search engines only use spiders to see the web. A spider is like the eyes of a search engine. So, if you show the “eyes” a web page, how is the search engine to know it is false?
In my experience, the way they learn this is by doing manual checks of the most popular web pages. For instance, I had a web page that ranked for one of the most popularly searched terms on the web at the time. To get that ranking, cloaking was used. But, as my website got the #1 position, it seems Google did a more in-depth analysis of the page content.
Within a month of getting the #1 spot for a hugely popular keyword, the site got banned. It may not have been for the cloaking, but it was the most obvious attempt made to manipulate the search engine rankings. It took 3 years for the site to get back in the index. By that time, the hugely popular keyword phrase had a fraction of the importance it had at the time of the banning. So, my advice, do not cloak.
Sig stuffing.
Another tactic that will get you a Google penalty is sig stuffing. For a long time I thought the sheer amount of links to a website would help its ranking in Google. If those links came from an established, well-known forum, I thought this would be even better. Well, that is wrong!
A signature has to do with forums. When you make a post in a forum, the area beneath that post is called the signature, or sig. You can usually set what appears in your signature by going to the user control panel in a forum. They will have an area called ‘Edit Signature’ and allow you to place code there, including links.
Sig (or signature) stuffing happens when you put nothing but links in your signature with the hope of improving in the Google search engine rankings. While it is true people may do this to drive traffic to their website, it seems Google may penalize your website for doing this.
After removing a number of links in a signature of one of my forum user accounts, I noticed a dramatic increase in the rankings of the sites that were listed. In the future, I will only use the signature area to drive traffic rather than improve Google rankings.
What May Work but Unsure.
Without a doubt, one of the clearest ways to establish what your web page is about is to look at its keywords. But, there are many different ways a search engine spider determines what keywords to find in your page. Some areas they identify are the meta tags (title, description, keywords), the header tags (h1, h2, h3), the frequency of the keyword in the page, and the order of the keyword in the text (does it appear first, later, or last).
With this knowledge, you know what to do when creating a web page, if you are trying to optimize it for the search engine spiders. This leads to a tactic that many, many webmasters have tried, with mixed results. It is keyword stuffing.
Manipulating the Web Page.
Suppose you have a website that is ranked below a number of other websites for a certain keyword phrase. Let’s say the phrase doesn’t appear in your web page very prominently. What some webmasters will do is change the text in their web page to include the keyword phrase more prominently. This can be very important if the keyword phrase is popular and/or profitable.
Changing the text on your web page specifically to rank higher in Google, isn’t so bad if you are changing the content to add more value to potential web page visitors. However, if you go too far, it becomes what is known as keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing is changing a web page to include more keywords than is gramatically necessary to make a web page appear more relevant to search engine spiders. Thus, it is hoped to improve your search engine rankings.
While I have done this repeatedly on many web sites, it is not clear if this has any real positive effect. While your ranking may improve in Google, it may deteriorate in Yahoo or Bing or other search engines. If your ranking is not in the Top 10 in Google, but is in the Top 10 for other search engines, this can have a very detrimental effect on the success of your website.
The Stingy Web Page.
Some have speculated, and it is most likely true, that you are penalized based on the links on your page. If you link to a website that has been banned or penalized in Google, then it is assumed your website is similar. Therefore, your website could be banned or penalized, too!
Another issue with links are what is called dead links or holding page links. If your website has many links to web pages that no longer exist (dead links) or 404 pages on websites because the web page content no longer exists (holding page links), then Google will consider your website stale. This could result in a penalty for your website, which means lower search engine rankings.
Link Hoarding.
To get around the link problem, some webmasters only link to websites that are either entirely controlled by them, already very well established, or will not link to other sites at all. When you do this, it is called link hoarding.
Whether link hoardng works is unknown. On the one hand, it greatly reduces the possibility of linking to bad websites (penalized or banned). But, on the other hand, Google may penalize you anyway because your website appears to be a dead end. The Google web spider is unable to reach any other website, from your web pages.
Link stuffing
For the webmaster trying to manipulate links, another technique to try is putting as many links to web pages from one website as possible. It has been speculated that Google will not go any deeper than 2 links into a website. So, if no other site on the web links to a web page on your site, the Google spider gives you two chances on site links to get there.
To get unlinked or deep content (not linked to from other websites) ranked in the search engines, what some webmasters will do is “stuff” a web page on another site they control. The home page on site 1 will have a list of links to web pages on site 2 that cannot be reached in 2 links from site 2′s navigation structure.
I have certainly tried this approach. It does seem to create penalties when you combine this approach with sig stuffing, from a forum. But, it is unclear if that is true if the “stuffed” web page is one you control. The best strategy to avoid the deep content problem is to put the link in a blog. If you can’t do that, then have a very shallow linking pattern. This means every page on your website is no more than 2 links away from the home page.
What Does Work.
Without a doubt, the most effective way to get ranked in any search engine is to have a website that is linked from certain “authoritative” websites. If you get a link from Wikipedia, EBay, Amazon, a college or university, a charity or church, or a large corporation (there are many more possibilities), you will be greatly helped in the search engines.
Blogs.
Of course, getting an “authoritative” link is not easy. That is one reason why they are so valuable. But, another way is to have a blog. Google loves blogs. If you update the content fairly frequently (twice a week), the search engine spiders will have reason to visit your site. This is good because sites with more frequent visits from search engine spiders tend to get better rankings.
The best blog software to use is WordPress. It is widely supported, highly customizable, relatively easy to install (and easier to upgrade), and not too difficult to learn. If you are thinking about doing it yourself, I highly recommend looking at WordPress first!
Page content.
While it is true, web page content can be easily manipulated to try and get higher rankings, it is probably the number one way to determine what a web page is about.
If your website has many authoritative links pointing to it about bird feeding, but the content is about auto repair, you will not rank for very long for bird feeding. However, if the links point to bird feeding and the search engine spider finds content about bird feeding, your web page will rank much higher and longer, than it would otherwise.
You must be sure that your web page is laser-targeted on the most valuable keywords. Without a doubt, this should be the 1st lesson you learn to improve ranking in the search engines.
Unique content.
While you may have a highly-focused web page, it doesn’t mean much if a million other web pages have the same content. You become just another face in the crowd without anything to recommend your content as being a reason to rank higher in the search engines.
For Google at least, unique content is very important. This is true for several reasons.
1) If the google spider sees you have content that it has already indexed, your web page may get hit with a penalty, reducing your rankings.
2) Your duplicate content may give the google spider less reason to visit in the future. That will definitely hurt your ability to rank and to get new content included in the search engines.
3) You may get hit with a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) notice. Believe me, these are serious. You will not only get that web page removed from the index, you may also get booted from the Google ad network. What if your home page has duplicate content (rather than an interior page) and you get a DMCA notice. You could get your website kicked out of Google!
Now, this is not to say any of these things will happen if you have duplicate content. Just be aware there are risks, which is another reason to use unique content whenever possible.
Fresh content
Not only does it help to have unique content. It is very helpful to have fresh content. This doesn’t mean changing your whole web page every day, every other day, or every week. It just means that some part of your web page needs to be updated periodically.
This isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Usually, the only page that really needs to be updated is the home page. The reason is that the search engine spider has to start somewhere. Since the home page is the entryway to your website, updating it periodically will give the spider a reason to come back.
Regular search engine spider visits give you the opportunity to more finely tune your keyword phrases, get new web pages indexed, and to establish your web page as an active page on the web (building authority). These all help in search engine rankings.
Your URL.
When a search engine decides where to rank your website, it considers page content and links. A third factor is the URL of your website.
When a search engine ranks a website, and it sees the keyword phrase in the URL, it assumes that is what the website is about. This gives you a BIG BOOST in rankings you would not get with an unrelated URL.
The best place to have the keywords is in the domain name itself. For example, if you have a website about web services in Uganda and your website domain name is webservicesinuganda.com, you are given a real boost in your search engine rankings that you would not get with webservices.com or servicesinuganda.com.
If you do not have the keyword phrase in the domain name, the next best place is your directory structure. Let’s say your domain name is happygolucky.com. If you want to rank for automotive repair in Boise, Idaho, then a web page with the URL, happygolucky.com/automotive-repair/Idaho/Boise will give you a good improvement in the search engines.
Not everyone will be able to get their keyword phrase in the domain name. But, you can get it in the directory structure. Without a doubt, this helps in the search engines. So, when you create new content, keep the directory structure in mind and the relevant keywords, if you want to have a good chance at ranking in the search engines.
What Does All This Get You?
If you avoid the known pitfalls and stick with the proven techniques, you give your website a chance to get a good ranking in the search engines. It takes a lot of work and attention to detail to include each of these elements into every page of content you create or have. However, the payoff in improved search engine rankings is hard to argue.
While it is clear what works and what does not, it is the unknown factors that may make the difference between a good ranking and a great one. Once you have mastered the proven techniques, you will be ready to be more adventurous at improving your search engine rankings with more untested strategies.
Hopefully, knowing what has worked and what does not will help you see better results in your search engine rankings.
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