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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!

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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.

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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.

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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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For the last few weeks, I noticed that my website had completely fallen off the face of Google’s rankings for a certain keyword (I’ll reveal my work for this particular site someday…I promise) only to start making its way back…first at around 120 then slowly back to the top hundred, to the top fifty, to the top 10, and finally resting at number 7 for about two weeks. I was very happy with this result as I was making a few bucks every day. Every visitor to that website ended up netting me about $2.12, so the ranking at #7 was working well for me and I was trying to get the website to rank higher.

At that point in time, roughly 3 weeks ago, I loved Google for that website! This website is also my highest earner, so when I noticed that, without any changes on my part, the site was ranking at roughly at #120 I was very shocked, surprised, and confused.

For the last three weeks I have been working on redesigning the website and trying to figure out exactly what made it fall from grace. I know its not the competition…no offense to their webmasters but their sites are bad and have very little original content and my website is completely original with the exception of a little bit of text taken from the affiliate program’s website. All in all, my site is more original than a lot of Hollywood movies and certain TV shows.

Last week I found out about Google’s supplemental index and how it can impact your SERP. Google’s supplemental index, from what I gather, is where bad pages go to pasture. The supplemental index is where Google places pages that are either duplicate in content to other pages of the website or pages that it considers low in quality. The supplemental index is also a problem for anyone running a Wordpress blog, like me. Wordpress creates more than 1 copy of each page upon publishing: 1 on the main index page and one on the archive as a permalink. So every time that any Wordpress blogger publishes a new page, Wordpress creates (at least) 2 pages and Google sends those pages to the supplemental index, eventually.

What can you do to fix the supplemental index problem? I’m not exactly sure how to go about removing pages from Google’s supplemental index, but I know that it is possible to control the Google Bot for future crawls by having a well done robots.txt file. This is what I have done to my robots.txt file in order to control my supplemental index problem:

sitemap: http://www.URLGOESHERE.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /design/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /blog/wp-admin/
Disallow: /blog/wp-includes/
Disallow: */page/*
Disallow: */wp-images/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /*?*

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror

Disallow: /

There is a lot to talk about here, so the details will have to be for another post. The long and short of it is that I want Google to not go to certain parts of my website and hope that from here on out, my supplemental index entries will be kept to a minimum.

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SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — Bonnie Brown was fresh from a nasty divorce in 1999, living with her sister and uncertain of her future. On a lark, she answered an ad for an in-house masseuse at Google, then a Silicon Valley start-up with 40 employees. She was offered the part-time job, which started out at $450 a week but included a pile of Google stock options that she figured might never be worth a penny.

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Organic search is, in my opinion, the best way to get traffic. Not only is it free, but it drives in people that are looking for your content. In contrast to advertisements, social media sites, or forum communities where people click through and stay on your site for less than 30 seconds, organic search results drive curious people who are looking for what you have to say and these people are the ones who are most likely to buy what you are selling. Your search ranking on Google or any other engine (but really, do they matter that much?) can equate to a lot of money or it can make you cry at night because you are not even bringing in enough money to bay for your hosting bill.

It is from this perspective, the perspective of a website builder and content provider, that I write this list. This represents what I find most frustrating and difficult about Google and feel that I can’t possibly be the only one on the entire Internet who feels this way.

SERP Fluctuation

SERP (Search Engine Results Page or Search Engine Ranking Position) is how high or low your website ranks when someone does a search for a given term. For example, a search for “Nicaraguan coffee” yields over 1.3 million results. If you are serious about internet marketing and are actively trying to make money from a site that sells Nicaraguan coffee, then the ‘rank’ that you receive from the search is very important. If you don’t come up in the first 10 spots, your profitability drops very rapidly. That is why SERP is so important. If you place well, you can stand to get a lot of visitors and make a lot of money.

This is my #1 frustration with Google. It is impossible to know exactly how Google ranks certain pages. From experience, I have been nearly driven mad. One day I had a term ranking #2. It brought me a lot of traffic for a certain niche and I was making about $60 a day. Too bad that this only lasted for 3 days. The 4th day after ranking at #2 consistently, my site started showing up at #146. I’m not making this up. I did not change the site other than add quality content to it but the site stayed at #146 or lower for about 2 months. Sometimes the site wouldn’t show up at all even after I searched over 400 results. It is finally making its way back up the list but it caused me to nearly quit that site.

Backlinks

Simply put, backlinks are links from other sites to your site. It is assumed that the number of backlinks coming into your site affect your search engine rankings. My opinion is that more backlinks help to place a site better on a results page. Google even offers a way for you to check for backlinks to your site. The problem is, I’ve never had a site show up in those results. I don’t know what Google considers a backlink but their backlink check only ever returns 1 results in all of the sites that I own. It’s rather frustrating, especially if building backlinks is the foundation of results placement.

SPAM Sites Do Well

Along the lines of SERPs comes the topic of SPAM. In certain niches in which I have sites, there are a handful of sites that are completely crap but they rank higher than me. These sites include sites with only 1 page, sites with irrelevant domain names, and sites that are written very poorly. How is that fair? I spend a lot of time making sure my sites are accurate, well written, standards compliant, more accessible, etc…and somehow they end up at the bottom of the pile.

My lesson so far has been to not give up. Eventually, I hope, Google will have its algorithm squared away in a way that it will eliminate the SPAM and eat up the ham. I just hope that day arrives soon.

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I do think that, as a user, Google has a lot of good things to offer and this is a list of my favorite things I get from Google.

Gmail

Gmail has really changed the way in which I do email. I used to have 5 or 6 email accounts that I looked at daily. It was quite a pain to switch from website to website, enter lots of passwords, and fight all that spam in my mailbox. Not to mention that whenever I had to find a certain message I’d have to waste a lot of time finding it. Additionally, I’d almost always be running out of space with those email services of old.

With Gmail, I am now able to manage more email accounts in a much more efficient manner than ever before. For starters, all of the domain names that I own have email addresses associated with them and I’ve set it up so they go directly to Gmail. Secondly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to run out of space on Gmail. Thirdly, finding messages is a snap. If you don’t have Gmail, you’re missing out.

Google Search

As a curious person, grad student, web developer, webtrepreneur, and web jockey, I must use Google’s search engine at least 50 times per day. With Google, I really don’t think there is much that can’t be found online. Not much more needs to be said about this, so if you’re not using Google search, you’re missing out.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is one of those things that a lot of people I know don’t even know exist. It’s one of the features that at first I thought: “huh, that’s nice” but now find that it’s very useful. Google Notebook lets you create a seemingly unlimited number of “notebooks” and write as much as you want in each book. I use my Notebooks for class notes, business ideas, plans for blogs, to-do notes, to paste interesting things I find online, and whatever else I can think of.

Google Notebook also has an extension for Firefox that allows you to cut and paste into the notebooks much more efficiently (right click > send to notebook).

Google Documents

Google Notebook’s big brother, Google Documents is a productivity suite that keeps growing. With Docs, it is possible to create Microsoft Word like documents, Excel like spreadsheets, and PowerPoint like presentations. In addition to being full featured, Google Documents is completely free and the best part is that you can share your documents and work in a collaborative environment with others (as long as they also have a Google account).

Google Maps

I gave up using Mapquest a long time ago. Mapquest always seemed to get me lost and turning at the wrong place at the wrong time. Their descriptions weren’t very good either…one time it told me to drive “slightly straight”. I mean, what the heck does that mean? That’s why I was so glad when Google launched their alternative to Mapquest. Since then, my driving directions have been more accurate and nearly fun to get. The map interface is detailed and using it is a breeze.

Bonus: Google Reader

RSS Feeds have become a daily part of information getting and analyzing for me. It’s so simple to go to one place and find my favorite sites’ contents all in one place. Google reader is full featured, easy to use and organize, and with me wherever I go. If you have Google Reader or are about to, make sure to subscribe to my RSS feed!

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