If you are just starting out in seo, don’t think you can fool Google about everything all
the time. Google has probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep it simple.
GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. If you are just starting out – you may as well
learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first.
Don’t expect stellar results without a lot of work, and don’t expect them too fast.
Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble.
1. You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural or free listings
(SERPS). It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty
easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your
website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML
sitemaps for instance).
2. To stay in Google and other search engines, you really should consider and
largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With
experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and
which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
3. Google ranks websites by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from
other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link
from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page
the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can
become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY
affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.
4. I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL
COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It
indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has
content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump
through hoops to get it ranking.
5. If you have original quality content on a site, you a lso have a chance of
generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites,
you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google
favours diversity in its results. If you have decent original content on your site,
you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about
it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
6. Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be
ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for
instance)
7. Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can
also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a
search engine in the last 10 years – you probably don’t need to do that.
8. Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls and indexes
the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your we bsite
if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way).
9. Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms
until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends
on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while
then disappear for months. This is called the “honeymoon period”.
10. Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and
this classification can have a DRASTIC effect on your rankings – it’s important for
Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to
classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a
small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by
being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a
real business, and your INTENT is genuine. NOTE – If a page exists only to
make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam.
11. To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on
your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is
all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links
pointing to your page/site.
12. As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain
amount of PageRank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your
website that will in future help determine where this page ranks.
13. Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more Google Juice. Google is
a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it
does understand ‘popular’ content.
14. When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by
ensuring all your pages are linked together
15. I think your external links to other sites should probably be on your single pages,
the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the
higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages).It’s not JUST a
numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could
be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust
Google will have in your site. It’s pretty clear that you need MULTIPLE trusted
links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google.
16. Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it – not,
for instance, in blogrolls or sitewide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously
“machine generated” i.e. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from
pages that in turn, have a lot of links to them.
17. Internally, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text – I
usually only do this when it is relevant – and recently, I’ll link to relevant pages
when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for
auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto
link plugins, for instance.
18. Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all
search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. i.e. “seo
scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“.
19. I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it
natural. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of
a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for
instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it.
20. Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the
links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your
pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally,
begin to return your pages in search results (SERPS)
21. After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems
‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them. Ideally
you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page
descriptions if you deem to use the latter – most search engines don’t use the
meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches
if not relevant – I don’t worry about meta keywords these days.
22. Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links
23. If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about,
Google will ignore your page. If your site has spammy signals. Google will
penalise it.
24. You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the
competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text
content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword
stuffing is a tricky business.
25. I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant words on the page.
26. If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it
depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY
DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential
means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites for example don’t do well in
Google these days without some good quality backlinks.
27. Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps
determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite
simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but
at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as
search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I
have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question)
from linking out.
28. Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s
opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again.
I usually err on the safe side – I go for massive diversity in my links – to make
them look more natural. Actually, I go for natural links in 2013 full stop. Google
can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and
individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.
29. Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to.
30. Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can
help Google by linking to your important pages.
31. It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales
keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site
pages, so Google does not “demote” starved pages into its reserves, or
“supplementals”.
32. Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via
the template navigation on the site.
33. Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then get REPUTABLE. The key to ranking in
Google is actually pretty simple.
34. Every few months Google changes it’s algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or
industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such
updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes it’s algorithms
to control its listings pages. The art of SEO is to rank high without tripping these
algorithms – and that is tricky!
the time. Google has probably seen your tactics before. So, it’s best to keep it simple.
GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. If you are just starting out – you may as well
learn how to do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first.
Don’t expect stellar results without a lot of work, and don’t expect them too fast.
Expecting too much too fast might get you in trouble.
1. You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural or free listings
(SERPS). It’s common for the major search engines to find your website pretty
easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so much easier if your
website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you update content (via XML
sitemaps for instance).
2. To stay in Google and other search engines, you really should consider and
largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion. With
experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules can be bent, and
which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be avoided.
3. Google ranks websites by the number and quality of incoming links to a site from
other websites (amongst hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link
from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page
the link points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can
become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are HUGELY
affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page is on.
4. I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with ORIGINAL
COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t found before. It
indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start. So – make sure each of your pages has
content you have written specifically for that page – and you won’t need to jump
through hoops to get it ranking.
5. If you have original quality content on a site, you a lso have a chance of
generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is found on other websites,
you will find it hard to get links, and it probably will not rank very well as Google
favours diversity in its results. If you have decent original content on your site,
you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about
it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
6. Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be
ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for
instance)
7. Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can
also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a
search engine in the last 10 years – you probably don’t need to do that.
8. Google spiders a link to your home page, finds your site, and crawls and indexes
the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your we bsite
if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way).
9. Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms
until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google – I think this depends
on the quality of the incoming links. Sometimes your site will rank high for a while
then disappear for months. This is called the “honeymoon period”.
10. Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site – and
this classification can have a DRASTIC effect on your rankings – it’s important for
Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do you want to
classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a domain holding page, or a
small business website with a real purpose? Ensure you don’t confuse Google by
being explicit with all the signals you can – to show on your website you are a
real business, and your INTENT is genuine. NOTE – If a page exists only to
make money from Google’s free traffic – Google calls this spam.
11. To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on
your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) – ultimately it is
all dependent on the competition for the term you are targeting) or in links
pointing to your page/site.
12. As a result of other quality sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain
amount of PageRank that is shared with all the internal pages that make up your
website that will in future help determine where this page ranks.
13. Yes, you need to build links to your site to acquire more Google Juice. Google is
a links based search engine – it does not quite understand ‘good’ content – but it
does understand ‘popular’ content.
14. When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by
ensuring all your pages are linked together
15. I think your external links to other sites should probably be on your single pages,
the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the
higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages).It’s not JUST a
numbers game, though. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could
be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust
Google will have in your site. It’s pretty clear that you need MULTIPLE trusted
links from MULTIPLE trusted websites to get the most from Google.
16. Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it – not,
for instance, in blogrolls or sitewide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously
“machine generated” i.e. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from
pages that in turn, have a lot of links to them.
17. Internally, consider linking to your other pages by linking to them within text – I
usually only do this when it is relevant – and recently, I’ll link to relevant pages
when the keyword is in the title elements of both pages. I don’t really go in for
auto-generating links at all. Google has penalised sites for using particular auto
link plugins, for instance.
18. Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all
search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms. i.e. “seo
scotland” as opposed to http://www.hobo-web.co.uk or “click here“.
19. I think the anchor text links in internal navigation is still valuable – but keep it
natural. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of
a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for
instance how many words Google counts in a link, but don’t overdo it.
20. Search engines like Google ‘spider’ or ‘crawl’ your entire site by following all the
links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your
pages. Google will crawl and index your pages, and within a few days normally,
begin to return your pages in search results (SERPS)
21. After a while, Google will know about your pages, and keep the ones it deems
‘useful’ – pages with original content, or pages with a lot of links to them. Ideally
you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page
descriptions if you deem to use the latter – most search engines don’t use the
meta description when actually ranking your page for specific keyword searches
if not relevant – I don’t worry about meta keywords these days.
22. Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links
23. If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about,
Google will ignore your page. If your site has spammy signals. Google will
penalise it.
24. You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the
competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text
content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density. Keyword
stuffing is a tricky business.
25. I prefer to make sure I have as many UNIQUE relevant words on the page.
26. If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too – but again, it
depends on the site in question. Who you link to, or HOW you link to, REALLY
DOES MATTER – I expect Google to use your linking practices as a potential
means by which to classify your site. Affiliate sites for example don’t do well in
Google these days without some good quality backlinks.
27. Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps
determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite
simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but
at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as
search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages, but I
have never really seen any granular ranking benefit (for the page in question)
from linking out.
28. Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” – in Google’s
opinion. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site, but again.
I usually err on the safe side – I go for massive diversity in my links – to make
them look more natural. Actually, I go for natural links in 2013 full stop. Google
can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and
individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.
29. Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to.
30. Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can
help Google by linking to your important pages.
31. It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales
keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site
pages, so Google does not “demote” starved pages into its reserves, or
“supplementals”.
32. Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via
the template navigation on the site.
33. Focus on RELEVANCE first. Then get REPUTABLE. The key to ranking in
Google is actually pretty simple.
34. Every few months Google changes it’s algorithm to punish sloppy optimisation or
industrial manipulation. Google Panda and Google Penguin are two such
updates, but the important thing is to understand Google changes it’s algorithms
to control its listings pages. The art of SEO is to rank high without tripping these
algorithms – and that is tricky!
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