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The question for the ages. How does one place well for certain keywords on Google? I get asked that more often than I would have thought. I’m not Matt Cutts nor am I an SEO expert, but I have done OK for a few of my sites in the recent past. There is no one magic trick to placing well in the engines and Google surely won’t give away any tips or tricks. However, they do give you a set of very vague guidelines to help you get an understanding of how to build your websites.

Firstly, keyword search results, or your search engine ranking position (SERP) determine how well you place when a user searches for a given keyword that is relevant to your site/page. Google advises you to make your page for the humans that are reading it, and if it’s relevant to humans then Google’s Googlebot will read it and index it. In addition to content, Google recommends that you have other links going to your site and that you also create a sitemap. You should also make it accessible and avoid keyword pollution, page cloaking, and other malicious things.

From the paragraph above, you can see that there are at least 4 recommendations. From these recommendations, honest developers and spammers alike will be indexed by Google. Google then aims to remove the spam and keep the ham. The honest content creator and the Evil Marketing Spammers (the Ems, as I like to call them) both have the same set of guidelines, but somehow, it seems like the Ems are getting ahead of the game. While the honest content creators strive to provide good content, the Ems will work their evil magic to beat Google’s rules and algorithms in order to rise above other more qualified and relevant websites.

Learn From the Ems

Then question then becomes simple. As content developers and non-spammers, what can we do in order to make our websites better than that of the Ems? How can Google find favor in our sites, given that we don’t have all the time, money, or other resources that the Ems have?

Lucky for us, Google has given us some starting points and the Ems have given us plenty of knowledge and insight into doing well for ourselves.

1. Human Readable Pages: Google recommends that your page should be human readable. Well, aren’t all pages readable to humans? I would say “sort of, yes”. However, what Google really means is this: “Make your content so that our bot can read it”. In other words, don’t create one huge .jpg with text on it. Googlebot will think it’s only an image. Don’t make your site in Flash if you’re not using any text that can be parsed. If possible, use only valid HTML code. That’s kind of what they’re saying. Googblebot is impressive, but it is not able to interpret things other than text so it goes through your source code and looks at what’s inside. It then makes sense of your content and indexes and ranks it accordingly.
   It also seems like Google cares about how much content you have. If there are two sites of similar quality, content, and ranking, I think that the one with more content will be ranked above the one with a lesser rank.
2. Incoming Links: In the Google Webmaster tools, there’s a way for you to check incoming links to your site. I’m not sure how the big G finds and categorizes the incoming links, nor do I know what they count as a valid incoming link, but that does seem to play a big role into placing well in the search results. We can learn from the Ems here and use some strategies if we really want our content to be found. We (as individuals) can create accounts on sites like Squidoo, Blogger, and Wordpress. We can then create content on each of these sites that link to our site. This is kind of an odd strategy because you are then creating SPAM to promote your quality site. I’m not too fond of this approach but I have used it in the past with a small degree of success. Likewise, you can create accounts to social bookmarking sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon and hope that your users will like your content. These two strategies combined can help your site to place higher in search engines.
3. Accessibility: Lastly, Google says your site should be accessible. This does not mean making it only so users can GET to your sites, but it means making the content “accessible” to people with disabilities. You do this simply by adding “alt” tags to your images and by adding titles to links. Make sure to validate your site using the W3 HTML validator.

Getting indexed by Google is the easy part. People will find you and people will get to your site eventually. If you employ the above strategies and work on building solid content, people will find your sites more frequently and you’ll start getting more and more hits organically. Keep your eyes peeled and examine the sites made by Ems. They’re good and you can learn a lot from them!

I’m a big fan of Matt Cutts, Google’s anti-SPAM czar. Matt is the man in charge of Google’s Webspam team and he often expresses his opinions along with helpful hints and tips on his blog. In addition to being a friendly blogger and conference speaker, Matt often posts nuggets that help us “ordinary” folks better understand Google’s algorithm and figure out how to work with the Googlebot.

Working with Google and doing our best to give it the kinds of information it wants is probably the best way to perform well in Google’s search results. While I (at times) applaud Google for their work, I often feel as though so much more could be done to help people work better with it. They’re not very specific but at the same time they provide a lot of information to help newbies create crawlable content.

It’s clear to me that there are 2 sides to Google: The search side and what I call the “show” side. The search side is self explanatory. That’s the part of the site where millions of people go to every day and look for webpages and information that they want to find. Be it for research or entertainment, Google’s search side of things is a well-oiled machine that is super easy to use and relatively easy to find the information that you’re looking for. Technicalities aside (this is a topic for another post), Google gives its search users what they want in a simple, quick, and relevant fashion. The “show” side, on the other hand, is not as simple to define but I claim that this side includes the Google Adwords ads, and every page that is displayed with a search result, including the search snippets and word highlighting.

As a publisher, it is obvious that whenever I make a web page I want it to appear above everybody else’s result. Regardless of whether the page is unique or has 10,000,000 competitors, I want searchers to find my page because I either think it’s relevant and will make their lives better or I stand to make money from it. Sometimes it is a combination of both. This page can be found through regular search or through ad placement via Adwords. This is where Google’s Catch-22 comes in. How doe Google qualify a page such that it ranks it above or below other pages? How does Google use its algorithm to place certain Adwords ads above or below other similarly priced ads? How does Google determine what to charge and Adwords advertiser?

The rest of this post will focus on the organic search results. The Adwords questions will have to wait for another post.

Although the answers to these questions are not clear nor are they stated anywhere officially, I have come up with a set of criteria that I believe help the user to figure out how to maneuver so that their results receive better treatment from Google. I do not claim that these are 100% original nor do I expect these to be 100% accurate; these are my speculations and opinions and I reserve the right to be wrong.

As you can see I believe that Google places the most emphasis on incoming links, followed by keyword density and lastly by readability. There are other factors too such as age of site and freshness of content, but I don’t believe they are weight too heavily so I allocated 5% for all of those items.

Incoming Links

I believe that incoming links account for 50% of your website’s SERP. Case and point: I have a website that has not been worked on very recently, but right after I bought the domain I spent a few weeks adding it to as many directories as I could. The directories were all semi-relevant to the domain name and I managed to add roughly 75 incoming links to the site in about a month. Even though I am able to see all but a few of those links when searching for them (using the “link:domain name” command while performing a search query on the Google site), the site still shows up in the top 100 for a keyword with medium competition. The content for the site is readable, but its keyword density is scattered and not focused. I believe that if I spent a few days boning up the content, that site would perform much better than it is currently. Hence my belief that incoming links account for 50% of your SERP score.

Keyword Density

Coming in at number 2, I think that there is a fine balance between too many and not enough keywords on a website to rank well for a page. I want to venture a guess that a page may not be stuffed with more than 4% and no less than 1% in order for the keyword density to be in the “safe” zone. If you have too many keywords, your site could be thought of as spam. If you don’t have enough keywords sprinkled throughout your text, your site may not show up at all in the results. There’s a fine balance and I believe that it is more science than art or luck.

Readability

Google wants people to be able to use the site, not robots. For this reason, they have created a set of murky guidelines that “help” webmasters to know how they should be designing and developing their websites. Within these guidelines, Google recommends:

“Use a text browser, such as Lynx, to examine your site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it.”

This means that the crawler looks for text and text only. If you have too many flashy things going on with the site, Google may not be able to “understand” your page and in turn, it won’t be ranked correctly.

Other

This last category is pretty open-ended. There are several things that belong here such as content freshness, how relevant your domain name is to your content, age of the domain and relevancy of links, meta tags, and others. Since this area is not clear, I won’t go too far into this topic but will say that Google does care about those factors. I may not be giving enough importance to these, or I may be giving too much importance to these. Regardless, those are tidbits that I have picked up from reading the webmaster guidelines and have not seen them play too much of a role in the SERP of my sites.

Conclusion

So, in an effort to please the searchers and work with the publishers, Google is on a never ending quest to beat spammers, while the spammers are on a never ending quest to beat Google. This catch-22 will, I believe, in the long run hurt the “litte guy” like me. I’m not necessarily trying to make a ton of money from organic search results on Google with this page. I’m not promoting “enhancement” products nor am I trying to sell you anything. However, my site will remain lower on the list than someone with more links than me or someone that has a higher keyword density than me. I’ll continue to build links and do my best to write for content and not search engines, but I just can’t help myself at being frustrated at Google for not spelling out how it is that they work. Better SERP is everyone’s goal, but I think if Google provided more clear guidelines, not only would they have less SPAM but they would also have a better way at filtering it.

It should come as no surprise that getting listed and indexed by Google is very important to your blog or business website. I run a few different affiliate websites and the fact that the sites are indexed by Google is the only reason why they are currently making money. Given that the sites are not performing extremely well for any particular keyword, visitors continue to find my sites when they type their searches on Google. Without Google, there would be no traffic to these websites and by now you should know that I think traffic is the new gold.

I have been building websites for a long time now, but within the last year I have been building sites with the hopes of making money online. I have tried several ventures in the past; coupon sites, tech reviews, eBay sites, affiliate sites, and blogs. Out of those sites, the most important aspect has been making them visible to other users through search engines (read: Google).

Why do Search Engines Matter?

The goal of any website is to have visitors, and to that end, there are basically 2 ways to get traffic. The first way would be to pay for traffic. This includes advertising on search engines, other websites, or through offline campaigns such as newspaper ads, television ads, or other means such as fliers or handouts. Alternatively, you could try to get free traffic. Free traffic happens when people either know your website’s address, are recommended by someone and follow the link, or find your site through search engines.

The cons of paid advertising are straightforward. Firstly and most obviously, it costs money. Many new sites and blogs don’t have a budget to advertise nor do they feel the need to advertise their site. Secondly, advertising is not always sticky. What I mean is that once your advertising budget runs out, people will not necessarily remember your site nor will they remember how to get there. You’ll get a spike in traffic while your campaign is running but as soon as it stops, your traffic will drop down to zero.

The pros of free traffic are more interesting. Firstly, it’s free. Nothing is required from you and people find you based on their needs and searches. Secondly, the hits you get are contextual and your visitors are more likely to take action (subscribe to an RSS feed, click through an affiliate link, etc…) because they found you based on results from a search they willingly performed. So here’s the question: how do you get free traffic?

The holy grail of free traffic lies with placing well in search results. Your search engine ranking position (SERP) is crucial to gaining free traffic and if you place in the first page of a search engine for a given search, you will be seeing a significant amount of traffic. Within these results, the higher you rank the more hits you will receive. In order to place well in search engines, you must first get indexed. This step is crucial and trivial, but you can do a lot to help your chances.

Use Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a set of utilities provided free of charge from Google. Within GWT, you are able to submit your site to Google along with a sitemap for your site.

After finding Google Webmaster Tools, your next step should be to add your site. This is simple, just type your URL in the dashboard and click on “Add Site”.

After you have added your site, you will need to verify it. For this step, you’ll need to figure out how you want to verify the site. You can do that either by uploading a file to your server or by adding a meta tag to your index page. Either way you choose, you need to verify your page.

As the last step, you need to add a sitemap to your site profile. The first thing you need to do is create the sitemap. If you don’t know how to do this, you can either install the Wordpress plugin or you can go to the free XML sitemap generator and create a sitemap you can upload to your site.

After you have added your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and your site has been verified, chances are that your site will be added to Google’s index. For me, this normally takes only a few days but some people claim to be able to do it in hours. I call “BS” on those people and think they’re full of it.

This is how your dashboard should look like once things are all done:

By this time you should be indexed in Google and ready to receive hits to your site. Your placement will vary depending on keywords on your site and competition for those keywords but this is the basic framework for getting added to Google and placing on search engines. After this you need to work on your site in order to place well. But that’s another post.

A little over a year ago I started using Gmail extensively. Outside of my job’s need for Microsoft Outlook, I’ve switched all of my accounts to forward to Gmail. This includes my website accounts, personal accounts, and some junk mail accounts. I’ve found that Gmail’s features and interface are so quick and easy to use that it didn’t make sense to keep everything in separate webmail sites. With the ability to label and “send mail as” features, Gmail is truly the king of free web-based email clients.

The only feature that I have missed or noticed missing from Gmail all this time was color coded labels. To separate my accounts, I’ve been pretty creative with labels by varying the text (using caps, a mix of caps and lowercase, etc…), or by using special characters (*’s or #’s or @’s…) to separate and make the labels stand out in some way. It was with great excitement that I noticed that Google has added a new feature to my Gmail that lets me color code my labels. I think this feature will really help me to visually recognize and act upon certain emails more efficiently and appropriately so that emails that need quick action get read and responded to and other emails can safely sit unread for a while.

If you don’t yet have a Gmail account, go to it and get one! Become friends with it and make better use of your time. Gmail is fast, easy to use, and full featured! Now that they offer color coded labels, there’s no reason not go have a Gmail account. Couple that with the super fast search and nearly unlimited storage space and you have yourself a winner!

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