Ranking high on Google comes from a number of factors. No one knows for sure what they are as google is not talking about how its algorithm is set up or working for that matter.
- The site must be built clean and light.
(This means there must be little to no coding mistakes in the site IE: Clean. When it comes to light, I am talking weight in computer size. Your images should not be 10MB when the same quality and results can be shown with 50k.)
Google will not penalize for these two mistakes but what will happen is it’s bot will leave your site and potenially not come back. The bot will read all the code in your site. If it finds a couple mistakes it will keep reading. If it finds major coding mistakes it might view them as suspicious and black list your site (very rare but does happen). As far as the images go, google will download a small catche of the image. These are the images we see when we go to “google images”. The image is too large google will drop the image when downloading it.
Keep in mind the bot is moving very fast reading site after site. There are billions of them that the bots must traverse. So anything you can do to help it along its merry way is a good thing.
Next as mentioned in the article is your “title” of your website. Very very important as mentioned in the article. I won’t go into it as Chris as it covered.
Many people believe you MUST have backlinks. High value backlinks at that IE google PR 3 or more. Well even though this is a good thing, it’s not 100% needed. I have sites listing with in the top 5 of google without one backlink, from anyplace. And yes the sites list high for very good keywords/phrases. So people go around and they start trading links with anyone who will link to them. Some go blackhat and pay to have 100’s if not 1000’s of links listed on “link lists” not a good thing as google has stopped their bot from indexing sites that have massive amounts of listed links with no relevance to anything. This same concept applies to social networking sites, like facebook, myspace etc.
Fact is google understands that not everyone can get a lot of backlinks. Your average user may have 5 to 20. Google wants these backlinks to be relevant to the site that is linking to it and vica versa. If I own a site that has DIY articles on it for home improvement and maintainence, with a lot of articles on it. I link to your site in my window cleaning article. Google likes this. It’s pointing the surfer to relevant information they can use. If I own a site on cleaning a car and link to your site. Google likes this as cleaning car windows would be looked at as relevant information for the surfer. If I own a site about sewing scarfs and link to your site. Googles bot will follow the link, but it may not read your site as your site has nothing to do with sewing.
Hope I’m clear on that cause it’s important in regards to backlinking. Very important.
Next thing you want is text. Lots of it. Google loves to read text. And yes the bot has been designed now to understand sentences so it’s important your text makes sense. Don’t put up a paragraph filled with sentences reading “I window clean windows, so the windows are super clean because I love to window clean. A bright day comes from clean windows and I can clean those windows.”
When you make this text there are html codes in which you can tell the bot to take more seriously. These are known as H tags. H1, H2, H3 etc. I forget, but i believe they go up to H6. H1 and H2 are most important. They should be placed in the 1st sentences of your 1st and 2nd paragraphs. If you do not like the way they look (because your webpage building software will have a default setting on how the tags should look on the website) you can change them. As an example your software may default your H1 tag to be BOLD and font size 24. But that may make your sites paragraph look silly. So change it to fit the style of the page. In reference to BOLD, words or sentences coded as BOLD will be looked at with more relevence by the bot. The bot is measuring your bold coded words against your keywords. Flood these keywords in your paragraph text and you won’t list on google for long. Flood them in BOLD and you will drop from google faster then normal.
The point here is SEO is not hard. Of course you need to know how to build a website and if you don’t you should learn. It’s the #1 advertising, marketing and branding you have for your business. More so than any print media you can make. It’s neck and neck with TV and radio. So you must provide honest, relevant information on the site about your company and services. If you do not, than your site will never list. There are other things that must be done for SEO but I don’t have all day to write them down. But if you read (OH NO I HAVE TO READ) and stay focused you can do this. Now is a great time to build your site. It’s our seasonal downtime and we should have enough breaks in our day to complete this task.
I built my first sight njwindowwashing.com from Nov to Jan 06/07. Once it was done. I did not submit it to google. I SEO’d it and mid Feb tossed it up, and submitted it to google, yahoo and MSN. By the end of Feb 07 I was listing in the top 5 on google and have sat there ever since. Other sites have come and gone but pretty much it’s been me and Chris since then.
SORRY FOR THE LONG ONE.
