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.