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Getting a top ranking on Google: How is it done?

Here we will help you develop a sensible strategy for promoting your website by weeding out all of the nonsense, myths and hype.

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

Search Engines are out to deliver the most current, relevant and accurate information to the public. They do this by using top secret algorithms for site rankings. Therefore, they are at constant war with SEO experts, whose goal is to ensure the top is dominated by their clients.

There are two "strategies" for getting top rankings:

"Black Hat" and "White Hat".

White Hat strategies deliver relevant, accurate, quality and timely information to help reinforce Search Engine design.

Black Hat refers to strategies that try to get around that by various ways of cheating. Black Hat techniques can work, but usually only for a short period of time until all the PhD’s at Google figure out what you are doing and find a way to plug that loophole - and ban you while they are at it.

No one knows for certain what ranking factors work, but these are the ones that have been well proven, have survived the test of time, and make intuitive sense, given the goal of the search engines themselves:

1. Well thought out content that relates to your theme. The more the better. Search Engines are getting better at interpreting sites though a process called "latent semantic indexing" with is a more complex way of saying that artificial intelligence is being used to determine what the site is about, as opposed to simple what keywords are within. Littering the site with as many keywords as possible simply doesn’t work anymore. Keywords are still required but now also require other phrases and words that are related to your topic keywords.

2. Incoming Links. Links from "bad neighborhoods" get you very little in the way of Google Page Rank. These links from Free-For-All (FFA) sites and link farms are not very well looked upon. Though Google does not penalize you for such incoming links, they definitely do not reward you for such. Links from authority sites, on the other hand, are worth quite a bit. Theme related sites are also quite worthy, ie if you have a computer gaming site, other gaming sites linking to you will be worth more than a website for household cleaners. To see how valuable a site roughly is in relation to others, see it’s Google Page Rank, the higher it is, the more valuable the site. Eventually, Google Page Rank will probably become specific to themes, meaning you could be ranked highly for one theme and rather low for another.

3. Sites that have been around a long time - If all factors are equal, Google Page Rank will rise with time. This makes older sites more worthwhile due to this reason.

4. Fresh sites - In the Search Engine’s quest to find hot news, they generally look to new sites and therefore give initial priority to the newer sites. SE’s also look for links pointing to these new sites as they are sometimes a stepping stone to other new content.

5. Outgoing links - Too many links can be a bad thing, especially when linking to bad neighborhoods. Though bad links coming in are not penalized, ones going out certainly are. Links out to authority sites are quite worthwhile.

6. Content words or keywords, as they are commonly known. Though they vary in how competitive they are, the best bet is to aim for your most focused keywords before the broader ones. For local business owners, try adding your local area name to your keywords.

7. Unique content. The last thing that search engines want to do is to deliver to the public 20,000 pages that all say the same thing! Duplicate content is quickly recognized and filtered out by the SE’s. Don’t just slap up the same articles that everyone else is using. You need unique content. That applies both to your own site, and also to the pages that are linking to you.