How to appease the Google Gods 11/10/2005
The Internet can make or break .company. Not only that, it is also proven to be the way of the future with regards to shopping. People consider search engines to be useful tools for locating information on demand,
but they are also, the worlds largest shopping hubs.
What do you mean?
Well, lets look at it with a different perspective, if e-commerce is booming and the growth rate is equal to the 1950's (do your homework and you will know what importance the 1950's had in regards to shaping America), and within the next few short years, China will be the biggest online presence in the world, the e-commerce growth rate will surpass that of the 50's by a long shot.
When that happens, whoever can get a foothold on their niche now, may be lining themselves up for some good times. In fact, I would venture to say that getting involved with the China market now, and market it correctly, will bring good fortune to you in the long run.
Where to get started?
Like I said, there are 3 big players in the search world, but if you create all of your marketing concepts around Google, everything else will fall in to place. You may not like what Google does or how they run thei.company, but the fact is, when you dominate the market, you need to emulate the leader or do better and the planets population has spoken, Google is the place to find what you are looking for. They have held this place for a while now and in some ways it gets better, but in others it does not.
For this article, I am not going to discuss what is good about Google or what is bad. What I will talk about is how to get them to like you.
I am sure than many SEO (search engine optimizers) will disagree, but below are the most important factors with Google in my opinion,
Content Proper Linking Title Tags Blogs
Content
Content is the single most important factor. Debate it all you want to, but if you think that your site will sky rocket to the top of Google with out that, you are sorely mistaken. What ever your niche is, write about it, make it unique, don't duplicate, and tie it in with other relevant subjects. I am not talking about writing a few paragraphs on one page, move to another page and write a few more paragraphs either. That is not going to work in the future, and it holds little to no value now. The more content you write for your site, the better off you will be. When I first started to do this, a wise man told me, write content for humans, not for search engines. What a concept, well that wise man could not have said it better and you know what, he was right.
Proper Linking
This is an area that has many benefits, not nearly as much as content, but still has much value with Google. If you have no proper linking on your site, how can a visitor navigate it? Even worse, how will Google know where to go? Google weighs a lot on links in and outside of your site. That is the fundamental basic of th.complex equation of Google's algorithm. For inner linking, I would suggest that you create your strongest links on your home page, then for each link on your home page, separate all of your sites relevance off of those.
Example:
Your home page has 4 strong inner links on them. Go to each one of those pages and link 4 more of your pages to that strong page, but make sure it is relevant to that subject. In essence, you will be creating site map trees based on what you feel is relevant to your site. When google crawls your site, they will notice this and see that you have taken the time to link all relevant material together for the customer and for googlebot.
For outer linking, anchor text links are the standard. Find people to link with that are not black hat SEO. I have seen a lot of people try and use black hat seo, and while it may give you the feeling that you are Neo hacking the Matrix for a little while, in the long run i hear the same things over and over again, "Looks like Google dropped all of my sites, time to start over." Why would you waste time on something that you know is only going to be a band aid? I guess everyone has their own methods, but I think if black hatters would do better if they did white hat SEO because they will benefit from it and it takes the same amount of time as Black hatting does..
Title Tags
This is not only important for search engines, but it is also the first thing that a visitor will know about that page. What ever the content is based on, make that your title. If the title has strong relevance to the content (better than 80% in my opinion), you will be better off in the long run because google will say, hmm, seems like the title they have is right in line with the rest of the page, but the web site ahead of this one in rankings does not have any relevance and barley any content relevant to the keyword, better move this one up. Also it is Important to make the title have some kind of clean impact because that is the first the the potential visitor is going to see. That could be the deciding factor in getting the visitor.
Blogs
When I first heard about blogs, I thought to myself, "this seems like its meant for diaries and hobbies, nothing to see here with my world, move along." I could not have been more incorrect, in fact, I believe that blogging holds greater weight than some may expect. The sad part is, that others have caught on to this new method of SEO and use them as link farms, or what I like to call "Blog Spam". Blog spam will get you indexed faster for other links, but google is aware of this and are beginning to attack that approach with swift penalties. I will recommend that you should have a blog, but again, my approach is somewhat different than most SEO.
Example:
Every major search engine recognizes the importance of blogs, in fact, some have even began to include their blogs in their respective news section. Obviously link farms wont be included, but if you know your niche well enough and it is a subject that already receives press, then you should write clear and concise entries on your blog, go easy on linking so it does not get flagged as blog spam, and sooner or later, search engines will not only index it, but also rank it high for various search terms and you may eventually be seeing your blog in the news sections of the search engines. I have not had that happen yet, but I do have one particular blog, that I believe will eventually make it.
In closing, there are a lot of other things tha.come in to play, but they are not nearly as important as what is in this article. If you are scratching your head because of the recent Google updates and want to know what you can do to improve your lost rankings, I would suggest you at least try to write content, get good proper linking, have a title that has relevance to the content, write about it in your blog.
