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How do you get to the top of Google?

By: John Barber

Denver SEO expert, Scott carvin discusses how to get to the top of the SE's.

Precisely what I want to do here is to strip away all of the rubbish, misconceptions and nonsense that is out there so that you may develop a practical methodology for promoting your site.

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

The truth is that all search engines like google use their own, top magic formula, algorithms to rank web sites. Their goal is always to deliver relevant, precise, and up-to-date info to their searching public. To do this, they are in a continual battle against Search engine marketing experts who seek to skew those rankings so as to put their own clients at the very top.

There are 2 "techniques" so you can get top rankings: so-called "Black Hat" and "White Hat". White Hat refers to approaches that actually work with the search engines - to provide high quality, relevant, accurate, timely information. Black Hat refers to approaches that make an effort to bypass that by a variety of ways of cheating. Black Hat techniques can work. but normally only for a brief period of time until all the PhD’s at Google figure out what you are doing and find methods to plug that loophole - and ban you while they are at it.

No one understands for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have made it the test of time, and make intuitive sense, provided the purpose of the search engines themselves:

•Quality themed articles, and lots of it. This will go beyond just stuffing in your key terms as much as possible. The SE’s are becoming better at figuring out themes by way of "latent semantic indexing", which basically means employing artificial intelligence to sort out what the site is about, rather than just what key phrases are in it. To make this happen you'll want to produce your key word, undoubtedly, and also other words and phrases that are associated with that.

•Links to your site. Normally, the more the the better. But not all links are made equal. Links on themed websites are usually worth more than on webpages that are not associated with your theme, ie links to your fishing website from another fishing site are well worth a lot more than if they come from a cooking site. Links from "bad neighborhoods" count for next to nothing. They don’t penalize you with regard to others linking to you, but they certainly don’t reward you for links originating from link farms, Free-For-All pages (FFA), and some other internet sites they consider to be bad. Links from "authority web sites" are worth a lot more. Some sign of a site’s value emerges by the Google Page Rank - the higher the better. Over time, the Page Rank probably will become theme specific - ie your website could have a high PR for one theme, and a low one for another.

•Old sites - ie which have been around for a long time are worth a lot more than a new one - generally speaking your Page rank will probably rise with time, other factors being equal.

•New sites are also worthy - keep in mind, the SE’s want to provide hot news, so they can give an initial priority to new websites, and also to new links pointing to websites, as they might indicate that there is some hot, recent, news on that website.

•Links OUT to authority sites are also worth points. But do not have too many. While you are not penalized for any bad links coming in, you could end up penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.

•The keywords themselves - obviously some keywords are much more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific keywords and phrases first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the key phrase.

•Unique content. The last factor that search engines like google want to do is to produce to the public 40,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is immediately acknowledged and filtered out by the SE’s. Don’t just slap up the same articles or blog posts that everyone else is using. You will want unique content. That does apply both to your own site, and also to the pages which are linking to you.

The Myths

•An SEO expert can guarantee you a top placement in the major search engines. Rubbish! Obviously he can’t. He does not own the SE, so this individual can’t control them, so he can’t guarantee any particular result. All he can guarantee is the actions he will take to attempt to enable you to get there. And in many cases if he could guarantee you a top placement, it could be WAY outside of your budget (whatever it might be)!

•An SEO professional will get you 100 PR5, 6, 7, or 8 links for $100. In your dreams. A single link on a PR5 page would probably cost you $50 per month. The higher the PR, the more costly. There are, actually, only half a dozen methods for getting links on high-PR pages:

•Buy them (very expensive - you'll pay close to $20 per year per link for PR2 links! - on 100 links that is $2,000 annually!)

•Talk them into putting a link on their website for free (!).

•Get them to enroll in your affiliate program.

•Provide them with user generated content that they Would like to put on their web-sites.

•Put them on low PR pages and wait for a PR to rise.

•Have such a awesome site that people voluntarily put links up and tell other people about you.

•You can see how many links that point to your page when using the link: command in Google or Yahoo. This command is broken and doesn't produce any meaningful results. To test that go to Google and type in link:myweddingfavors.com -

you're going to get 812 results (as of writing this - it might change.). However go to Yahoo and do the same. You will get about 253 results. Nevertheless, do a search for "myweddingfavors.com" (in any of the SE’s) and you will see the number of pages really are linking to them! The fact is, the SE’s don’t want you to know the number of links you have. Why not? Because it encourages you to cheat! The only person who can care the number of backlinks there are, is an individual who is trying to do Search engine optimization - and also the SE’s are at war with SEO.

Nevertheless - here is a Google Hack that reveals the real story: type in to your web browser the following search phrase, substituting yourdomain name details obviously (Note that the first one doesn't include the dot com at the end).

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=.yourdomain. - www.yourdomain.com

So - there is no-one to guarantee that the links they create will either be indexed at all or, when they are, will appear in that link: command.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Denver SEO - Scott carvin

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