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Search Engine Marketing – Optimising Your Website For Google 

Search Engine optimisation is a hot topic in internet marketing, so we have written a series of primers on the important factors in getting high search engine rankings. Each search engine is different and different search marketing techniques need to be used to get good rankings on them all. We do our best to keep these articles up to date, but please bear in mind that these factors are constantly changing. The important factors for Google ranking are as follows.

Off page factors 

Google relies heavily on off page factors when ranking websites. Google considers the web to be a democracy in which web sites vote for each other by linking. If I link to a site from my site, I am happy to send a visitor there, hence it is a vote of confidence in the quality of that site. The most important thing you can have, is a number of good quality backlinks to your site. The quality of the links will be measured by the Page Rank of the page that links to you and the relevance of the anchor text on the back link. Page Rank is a scale from zero to ten and reflect the importance of that page in Googles opinion. Page Rank is not as important a factor as it once was, but in the absence of any other measure, people still look at it. The two factors to consider are link power and link relevance. If your site is about car maintenance and you have a PR7 backlink to your site, it will not pass the relevance test if the anchor text refers to pasta recipes. Power is more related to the number of links that you have and the page rank of those sites.It has been said that Google likes up to 100 links, but I have seen cases where it ranks sites well when they have significantly more. One way or another, always prioritise quality over quantity. Google also does not like link churn, so keep your links as stable as possible. This is related to the next factor. 

Site Age 

Google prefers older sites to younger sites. Spammers continue to build large numbers of sites that add no value to the internet and Google is faced with the challenge of eliminating them from it's index. There is quite a debate among SEO professionals about how fair this is, but the stoics amongst us know that debate is healthy, but it is, what it is! Many people who create a new site find it very difficult to get a ranking in Google, even though they may have a superior site. This has led to talk of a Google sandbox, where new sites are placed until Google considers them mature enough to give a ranking to. If you are building a new site, you could consider buying an existing URL which has a PR score of 4+. This will by-pass any time you would spend in the sandbox. Otherwise, you will find that getting ranked by Google is much slower than MSN, for example. Similarly, links mature with Google over time, and many may not be recognised by Google for some time. I have heard the expression that ranking on Google is like running a marathon in reverse..you do all the hard work at the beginning of the race. Generally, it is a good idea to have other Internet Marketing strategies in place to bring traffic to your website while you are waiting to be ranked. It is possible to avoid the sandbox, but it can be expensive and it usually involves techniques that may put your site at risk in the long run.

On Page Factors 

These are less important for Google than for other search engines, but they do play a part in where sites rank for particular keywords. It is also true tha if keywords form a natural phrase, on page factors become more important than if the keyowrds are just a jumble of words. Google does read meta tags, alt tags, and it looks for keyword prominence and keyword density. It is a good idea to look at what top ranking competitors are doing with keywords to get an idea about what will work. Be subtle because the penalties for excessive manipulation fo these factors are severe. In fact if your pages were optimised in the past, it may be that you want to de-optimise some of these pages as you may be punished for trying to manipulate the results. 

Size 

Google prefers big sites to small sites. 

There are also a number of factors that can damage your ranking with Google and so need to be avoided. The most important include: 

Affiliate Sites - These are duplicate sites with little unique content. 

Linking To Bad Neighborhoods – Common when using link farms 

Over-optimisation – Excessive manipulation of on page factors. If you want to guidance on keyword densities for your sector, take a look at high ranking sites, and see the typical ratios that they use. 

All black hat techniques – Including doorway pages, redirects, backgournd colour text, background colour links, scrapped content or other copywrite violations. 

Getting a ranking on Google is difficult but by adding content, links and on page optimisation, you will reach your objective. Remember that anyone that promises you fast results and a top ranking on Google is not to be trusted.

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