Google, Google, Google. To most of us, Google=Search Engine. It is right, if you have a website, what’s your mission? Maybe you want to make some money, or you want thousands of unique visitors every day? What it all comes down to is to be #1 on Google (right, I personally don’t really care about Yahoo and Live). If you go to a SEO forum, there are tons of threads and suggestions for ranking well on Google. Well, here is a list of things that I personally feel are on the top list of Google’s ranking algorithm.
1. Title
No surprise here, page title, I just can not stress how important your page title is! Make your title descriptive and to the point. Make sure it contains the exact key terms you are targeting. The position of your title tag could be important to, so make sure in your code, it is RIGHT under <head>.
2. Content
Content is king in Google’s eye. Does your page have unique content that is useful to your readers? Think about the love that Wiki got from Google. Well, I am not sure about you, I am jealous. Why can’t Google just love me the way it loved Wiki? So make sure each of your page has at least 200 words description. You don’t need to intentionally stuff keywords in there. If that is what your page is about, keywords will be used very naturally. A little bit of trick can be played here though. You can use proper headings and create prominence (bold and underline your keywords) in your on page description. Keep your content updated regularly and keep it fresh. Google will love it.
3: Quality of backlink
When talk about links, I am not opposed of link exchanges as long as the site that links to you is trustworthy and the content is highly related to your site. When acquire links, evaluate the site and ask these important questions:
1: Does the site linking to me has a lot of quality content?
2: Does the site linking to me provides extra “value” to my visitors?
3: Does the site linking to me is authoritative in Google’s eye? Further evaluate based on 3 criteria:
a- Look at how many pages are indexed by Google
b- Look at how many backlinks are counted by Google
c- Look at the PR (some people’s favorite)
d- Look at the age of the domain
4. Internal Linking Structure
Some people actually ignored this factor. They seem only to know links from other sites are useful since one way link is so hard to obtain and we can do whatever we want with our internal linking structure. (Something that is hard to obtain is always better than something easy we can get). Well, don’t ever overlook the importance of your internal links. In your content, link to your own page with the proper anchor text wherever is appropriate. Say if you have a page ranked well for the term “computer motherboard”, in the content on that page, if you link to your page A using “Asus motherboard”, then the chance of your page A get ranked for “Asus motherboard” will be much greater than if otherwise.
5. Time
Get top ranks on Google takes time! (unless you start with a blog and start to target a long tail niche keywords). Don’t ever expect your hard work would pay off any time soon. Patience is the key. Keep writing quality content, acquiring quality links instead of staring at your PR every day. At last pray!!
