As a Phoenix SEO, i understand everyone wants to get to the top of the search engines.
So how do you get it done?
Precisely what I wish to accomplish here is to strip away all of the rubbish, misconceptions and hype that is out there so that you could develop a realistic strategy for promoting your site.
To begin with, what puts a page at the top of the rankings?
The truth is that all the search engines use their own, top secret, algorithms to position websites. Their objective would be to deliver relevant, precise, and up-to-date information to their searching public. To achieve this, they may be in a continual conflict against Search engine marketing experts who seek to skew those rankings so as to put their own clientele at the very top.
There’s two “methods” so you can get top rankings: so-called “Black Hat” and “White Hat”. White Hat refers to approaches that actually work with the various search engines – to provide high quality, related, exact, timely information. Black Hat refers to techniques that make an effort to bypass that by a variety of ways of cheating. Black Hat methods can work. but typically only for a brief period of time until eventually all the PhD’s at Google determine what you really are doing and find a way to plug that loophole – and ban you while they are at it.
No person knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the types which have been well proven, have made it the test of time, and make intuitive sense, provided with regards to the search engines themselves:
•Quality crafted content material, and a lot of it. This goes beyond just stuffing in your keyword phrases as much as possible. The SE’s are becoming better at analyzing themes by means of “latent semantic indexing”, which basically means utilizing artificial intelligence to sort out what the site is about, rather than just what keywords and phrases are in it. To make this happen you’ll want to produce your search phrase, certainly, as well as other keywords which might be related to that.
•Links for your web site. Normally, the more the merrier. But not all links are made equal. Links on themed web sites are worth a lot more than on pages that are not related to your theme, ie links to your outdoor web page from another fishing website are well worth a lot more than if they are derived from a cooking site. Links from “bad neighborhoods” count for next to nothing. They don’t penalize you for other people linking to you, but they definitely do not reward you for links coming from link farms, Free-For-All pages (FFA), and some other internet sites they consider to be bad. Links from “authority sites” are worth a lot more. Some indication of a site’s worth emerges by the Google Page Rank – the higher the better. In time, the Page Rank will most likely become theme specific – ie your site may have a high PR for one theme, and a low one for another.
•Old sites – ie that have been around for a long time are worth more than a new one – generally speaking your Page rank will rise with time, other factors being equal.
•New sites are also worthy – keep in mind, the SE’s desire to deliver hot news, so they can give an initial priority to new sites, and also to new links pointing to web-sites, as they may possibly reveal that there are some hot, recent, news on that website.
•Links OUT to authority sites can also be worth points. But don’t have too many. As long as you’re not penalized for any bad links coming in, you can be penalized if you link out to bad neighborhoods.
•The keywords themselves – obviously some search phrases are much more competitive than others. Aim to get ranked for your most specific search phrase first. If you are a local business, then tag on the name of your town or state to the keyword.
•Unique content. The final thing that search engines like yahoo 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 merely slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You will need unique content. That does apply equally to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.
The Myths
•An Search engine optimization expert can guarantee you a top position in the search engines. Nonsense! Of course he can’t. He does not own the SE, so he can’t control them, so he or she cannot guarantee any particular result. All they can guarantee is the actions he will take to try and get you there. And even if he could guarantee you a top placement, it would be WAY beyond your budget (whatever it might be)!
•An Search engine marketing specialist 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 around $20 each year per link for PR2 links! – on 100 links that is $2,000 annually!) •Talk them into placing a link on their website at no cost (!). •Get them to sign up for your affiliate program. •Provide them with unique content that they Want to put on their web sites.
•Put them on low PR webpages and wait for the PR to increase.
•Have a really awesome site that people voluntarily put links up and tell others about you.
•You can see the number of links that point for your page when using the link: command in Google or Yahoo. This command is broken and does not 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 visit Yahoo and do the same thing. You will get about 253 results. Nevertheless, do a search for “myweddingfavors.com” (in any of the SE’s) and you will see how many pages really are linking to them! The simple truth 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 real person who could care the number of inbound links there are, is someone who is trying to do SEO – and also the SE’s are at war with Search engine optimization.
Nevertheless – here is a Google Hack that discloses the actual story: key in to your browser the following search phrase, substituting yourdomain name details of course (Note how 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 – no one can guarantee that the links they create will either be indexed at all or, when they are, will show up in that link: command.
Strting with a quality Phoenix web design by USWebCentral will ensure your website gets the proper foundation for a proper SEO campaign
