Google Search SEO

Google has held the top spot as the dominant search engine in the United States for several years, with a total market share of over 85%. For nearly the last decade Google has remained the most-used search engine on the Internet, receiving billions of page views every day and about 600 million daily visitors. In 2008, Google had indexed over a trillion web pages, a dramatic increase from the 8 billion pages they had indexed only 4 years earlier. Google is ranked as the top website in the world for a reason, making the value of marketing your website on their search engine extremely high.

In terms of search engine optimization, a basic understanding of how the Google indexing algorithms work could mean the difference between failure and success for many small businesses. Google's search engine ranking algorithm is a tough monster to beat, with rumors estimating literally thousands of different factors each playing a role in how your website is ranked. Over the last couple of years, bits and pieces of this algorithm have risen to the surface of the world wide web, enabling Internet marketing companies to harness the true power of Google search engine optimization.

Fresh, original content is king in terms of ranking highly with Google. Make sure that your site is full of useful, rich in information that gives search engine users the answers they're looking for. Spend some time ensuring that the title and description text for each page of your website accurately describes their content so users can find information easily. Instead of writing your site with search engines in mind, write it primarily to satisfy the search engine user and then optimize the content afterwards.

Constantly generating fresh content on will help increase your website's ranking with most search engines. You should spend equally as much time generating fresh content as you spend on your SEO efforts, if not more. Google places an crazy amount of weight on freshly generated content and the amount of change that takes place on your site. Keep things fresh and Google will reward you for it!

It is rumored that Google favors sites that are large and full of original content, think Wikipedia. Spend considerable amounts of time writing new content and adding to the overall size of your site. Link pages of your website to other relevant pages on your site to create a "web" of information. Growing your site shouldn't be a major priority, but more of something that gradually happens over time as you continue to add quality content.

Keep the number of links on each page to a reasonable number. Although the exact number of links that Google deems 'reasonable' is uncertain, it is a known fact that the amount of links on each page of your website does have an effect on your search engine ranking. Keep the number of links you have on each page as low as possible, keeping in mind that the user should be able to navigate your site easily, without making any unnecessary clicks to get to where they need to go. Also, make sure each of your pages is reachable from at least one static link somewhere on your site.

In terms of Google SEO, inbound links (links that point to your site from another site) should come from quality, relevant sites. Due to the fact that you can't control who links to you, inbound links can never hurt your search engine position. Think of inbound links as 'votes' for your site. The more votes you have, the better off you are. All votes are not created equal, though, and votes that come from sites that are deemed high-quality and high authority by Google will count more towards increasing your page position than inbound links from lower quality sites.

The anchor text for inbound links maintains a decent amount of weight in Google's eyes, so make sure your inbound links make use of keywords in their anchor text when possible. Anchor text is the text that you click on to get to another website. This is an example of anchor text: Search Marketing Agency, the anchor text being "Search Marketing Agency". A large number of inbound links with anchor text that includes your keywords will improve your page position for those keywords or phrases.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that is used by Google to assign a weighted number to a website based on how many inbound and outbound links are are in Google's index for a particular website. Exactly how much weight Google places on PageRank is a highly debated topic amongst SEO professionals but most agree that it doesn't pull the same amount of weight as it used to. Some say that PageRank is given quite a bit of weight, others say PageRank is given no weight at all.

If you're concerned about increasing your Google PageRank, you should focus on building links with sites that have content that is similar to what you have on your website. Quality, relevant sites that have links back to your website is one of the fastest ways to increase your PageRank. Try to stay away from sites that aren't relevant to your particular topic as they won't count as much towards your PageRank. The more links that you have pointing back to your site from other sites with similar content, the higher your PageRank will be. Increasing your PageRank takes time, so don't expect to get instant results. Google doesn't update the PageRank of sites as often as it should so expect to see results in months, not weeks. It is estimated that Google updates PageRank values either quarterly or every two months, changing randomly each time.

Based on the trends found by pairing high traffic sites with their corresponding PageRank, it is safe to say that PageRank maintains at least a little weight when it comes to your Google ranking and search engine optimization. The most effective way to increase your PageRank is to increase the number of quality inbound links that point to your website.

To learn more about PageRank check out this blog post: Everything You Need to Know About PageRank by Third SEO.

Think about the words or phrases that users would type in to Google to find your page. These are the keywords that you want to place in reasonable quantities throughout your site on relevant pages. Once again, emphasis is placed on the word reasonable. Keeping the thought of quality content in mind, place your desired keywords amongst quality content in reasonable amounts.

Highly important keywords should be placed in paragraph headers and image names/descriptions when possible. Doing this will increase the population and weight of target keywords or phrases without overpopulating the body of the webpage with too many target keywords.

Keyword density is another important factor that many people say Google considers when ranking a website. Too many instances of the same keyword on any given page could result in a penalty in search ranking from Google. There is a lot of speculation as to what the right amount of keyword density is in Google's eyes, but a safe estimate would be around 4% of your content. That's 4 keyword occurrences for every 100 words of content. It's possible to get away with a higher keyword density percentage, but excessively high keyword densities could result in your site being blacklisted.

Make sure that your title, description and keyword meta tags have relevant values and at least one occurrence of your keyword or phrases where acceptable. This is very important when working with SEO. The title of your site (content within the title tag of each page) is arguably one of the most important factors that Google considers when ranking a particular page. Many major search engines only show up to 60 characters of page titles, so try to include your most important keywords within your page titles, keeping unnecessary and irrelevant words to a minimum.

Weight is given to the words that are closest to the beginning of the meta tag and decreases as you move farther from the beginning of the tag. Extra thought should be given to how you structure your meta tags, removing any unnecessary or unimportant words and placing keywords with high values close to the beginning of the meta tags.

In terms of search engine optimization and how Google evaluates keywords, keywords within the structure of a link are given more weight than the keywords found in the body of your page. Keywords within the link structure are weighted based on the order in which they appear (the first word is given the most weight, the second word is given the second-most weight, and so on).

Try to use text as opposed to images to show important names, content, or links on your site. Google's text-in-image recognition capability for their web crawler is still being developed so don't count on images to display your links or important content! As of right now, text links are the way to go in almost every situation.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (pages that have '?' in their link structure) you should know that most search engine crawlers don't have the ability to properly crawl these links. Although it's debatable as to whether or not the Google crawler has the ability to do this, some popular search engines don't crawl these pages properly. Since Google takes into account inbound links when determining your search position, you want all of the inbound links you can get, including the ones from other search engines.

When writing code for SEO, make sure all of your links take the user to the correct pages and that your website is crawler-friendly for the search engine crawlers. Revisit all of your pages to make sure the meta tags are properly defined (with reasonable keyword density) and double check all of your images to make sure their HTML attributes are labeled exactly the way you want them. Ensure the values that you give the meta tags and image attributes are both descriptive and accurate for the best possible results.

Whenever possible, try to place your images near relevant text and create accurate descriptions for the alt tags found in each of the code segments for your images. The page the image is on, the content surrounding the image and even the image itself are all important factors that should be considered when working with SEO. Providing good context for your images is almost as important as the textual content of the page itself. Try to make sure that your images and their surrounding content paint a consistent image for the web crawler. For instance, don't place a picture titled beach.jpg on a page that talks about growing sunflowers.

To maximize your SEO efforts, you should spend some time making sure that code required by certain advertisements to work properly, like Google AdSense for example, should be blocked from being crawled by Google's crawler. Blocking crawler access to these blocks of code will reduce the number of outbound links on your site, which will have a beneficial effect on your ranking position. Simply put a nofollow meta tag on the page with the outbound affiliate links and you should be good to go.

This little file can be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how you configure it. Make sure you understand how the robots.txt file works before making any changes to it. Properly configuring your robots.txt file can have a dramatic effect on search engine optimization. Make sure you block Google's crawler from indexing pages that are irrelevant, automatically generated, or don't have enough content to justify being crawled.

It is rumored that the amount of traffic your website receives has an effect on your overall search engine ranking. From past experience, this idea has proven itself to be very true. Sites that experience legitimate, large amounts of traffic usually have higher PageRank values as well as better search engine rankings. Some SEO experts say Google places some weight on traffic trends as well, adding merit and increased rank positioning to sites that maintain trends of increasing traffic amounts.

Age definitely plays a factor in determining your search engine ranking. Sadly, there's not much that you can do from an SEO perspective aside from waiting for your domain gets older in age. There is some speculation as to whether the length of your domain registration term effects your search engine ranking. Some say that registering your domain name for periods longer than one year has a beneficial effect on your ranking, but these rumors have never been verified.

Google values a web experience that is enjoyable to the user. Some say that the load time of your website and its performance during peak traffic times has a minor effect on your search engine rankings. Google even highly recommends that webmasters regularly monitor the performance of their site to ensure load times are quick and that the user experience remains great. From an SEO perspective, decreasing load times has become a very minor element because most web hosting companies offer very quick load times as part of their services.

• Stuff your site with an excessive amount of keywords or phrases


• Use 'tricks' in an attempt to improve your search engine ranking


• Participate in link schemes


• Use programs or bots to automatically subit your site to search engines


• Use programs or bots to automatically build links to your website


• Participate in the buying or selling of links


• Use cloaking or sneaky redirects on your site


• Use duplicated or stolen content


• Participate in anything related to spam. This will get you canned fast.