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A "Google" Approach to SEO
One of the firt places to start when it comes to understanding professional SEO practices is Google's Webmaster Guidelines for what makes a good, indexable website.
You know that as a professional, SEO practices should be based on research-based knowledge and not grey or black hat tactics. Make sure to ask questions to ensure your SEO expert is truly knowledgable and follows ethical seo practices.
Google is typically secretive about exactly how it ranks websites and it does not provide details about advanced SEO tactics, but only general guidelines for success and specific rules for what is not allowed. It is fairly well known that Google regularly changes its algorithms for ranking websites – as often as quarterly. This can make expending resources on SEO a difficult choice for many organizations because the same SEO project that is a success in one quarter may potentially become a failure in the next without the reasons for either success or failure being well understood.
As with site maps, Google gives preference to websites that include an up-to-date and detailed record of what has been added to the site since its inception or at least since the What’s New page was added. Again, in a hypothetical situation where Google considers two websites to be of equal value, it will give preference to the one that has a What’s New page or section.
A minority of less-ethical providers in the SEO industry focus on finding shortcuts to gaining rank in Google search results without doing the hard work of providing genuine, practical content that people value and recommend to others. When discovered, Google punishes the websites and companies that use these unethical practices by delisting them and often publicly denouncing them. A prime example was the delisting of BMW's German website due to deceptive SEO practices. The result is that many organizations are overly cautious of SEO for fear of being delisted and/or being associated with any negative public attention.
Are the websites linking to you deemed as an authority website by Google? Essentially, what you want to do is study the top ranked website for your chosen keyword. You need to do exactly what they are doing – only better. Obviously, these top ranked websites are doing something right, so learn from them and then take it a step further. Google looks at all the factors mentioned above – and then some, so make sure that you study the competition in order to rank better than they do. You don't have to beat your competitors in every single category – just in enough of them to weigh more heavily in your favor. For instance, if your competitor has 100 links to their site from other sites, find out the page rank of these other sites. If they are all have a 0 or a 1 Google page ranking, then it's going to be pretty easy for you to beat that. You won't need 100 links to your site, just a few actually; BUT from pages with a much higher page ranking!
Begin by typing your keyword into Google and take note of the #1 result. Study that webpage for a while – check their own Google page rank, etc. Now we want to check the links TO this #1 ranked site. Go back to google and enter in the search box the following: link:www.SITE (where SITE = the url of the site you are studying). This will return a list of all the sites that are linking TO your competitors website. From here you will want to check the page rankings of those sites and the anchor text that is used to link to your competitor. This entire process can be very time consuming, but is necessary to properly optimize your own website to rank above your competition. Once you have completed your research you will know exactly what you need to do to get your own page ranked higher on the search engines.
Google states in its guidelines that you should:
“Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link."
Here are some details regarding the most important ways to follow this guideline and be effective for SEO.
Navigation
• Create a clear and limited set of top-level, primary navigation choices – typically 5-7 at most and have the actual navigation links in text.
• Think of your primary navigation choices – typically those aligned horizontally near the top of the page – as options that set up channels of related information. I.e. if it’s related it is contained within the channel, if it’s not, it isn’t or at least not at length.
• Secondary navigation, if there is enough content to warrant it, should relate to the information within the specific active top-level channel. Likewise, it should be limited to 5-7 choices at most and be kept to the left or in some cases to the right of the page and be noticeably different from the primary navigation – one case where more than 5-7 sub-nav choices in OK is with a list of Blog entries, which is acceptable to be quite lengthy and have many articles list in the style of a sub-nav.
Static Text Links
• The easiest way to include static text links from one page to another and ensure they are included on all pages is to make your primary and secondary navigation choices static text links themselves.
In this context, ‘static’ means HTML code that search engine spiders can interpret, rather than JavaScript, Ajax, or the like.
• Beyond text links for navigation, it is also beneficial to include occasional links from within the body text of a page when referring to topics contained in other top-level channels.
One Last Item To summarize, webmasters and or SEO proffesionals who stray into grey or black areas trying to find a short way to a better rank end up where they always have ended up. Not listed at all.
Brian Ringland
http://www.makingmoneyfromyourblog.com
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