Keep it simple
I've read so many articles by SEO experts outlining how to get a high position on search engines. After ranking a website at number 1, and keeping it there for well over a year now I can offer some solid advice.
The truth is that getting a good, sustainable ranking is a relatively simple affair. However, SEO experts want to make it sound as complicated as possible. How else will they be able to charge you their consultancy fee?
Before you continue reading my blog read this link:
Google Guidelines for Webmasters.
If you adhere to those guidelines you will get ranked.
Stating the bleeding obvious
Question: How does Google make money?
Answer: Primarily by selling advertising.
Question: How does Google make money from advertising?
Answer: By getting lots of people to look at it and click through to their clients
Question: How does Google get lots of people to look at their adverts?
Answer: By have a good service that they want to use (the search engine)
Question: How does Google get people to click to visit their clients?
Answer: By showing adverts that are relevant to the user.
Helping Google for fun and profit
Too many SEO's spend time trying to manipulate Google. You really should be spending your time and effort trying to help Google make money. If you understand my logic above you will create sites that are useful and valuable to users. This makes it easier for Google to provide its users with meaningful search results. This makes it easier for Google to make money.
The mantra "content is king" is a direct consequence of following this logic. If you provide lots of valuable content then Google will see that your site is useful to users and will promote it in its search rankings.
The more money Google can make from indexing your site, the higher it will rank. Google is not a charity, that's why the owners have private jets and an airport to park them on.
If you make their life easy they will love you. If you try to trick them they will punish you. I always assume that the people at Google are cleverer than me. Matt Cutts academic record is enough to convince me not to try to be clever, for example.
Moving onwards with SEO
I'll spend some time examining the various Google guidelines over some postings in the future. To a newcomer they may seem pretty daunting.
I'll also cover some topics such as internal linking, sales funnels, and calls to action.
These are not neccessarily related to SEO but are directly related to the performance of your website. That said, I have found that by having a well structured internal linking campaign my Google ranking improved for certain "champion pages" which I then also pointed my pay per click (PPC) campaigns at. This dropped my cost per click and improved my organic results.
Just by the way... I got a Google alert mailed to me at 17h16 saying that Google has indexed this blog post.
ReplyDeleteThat means that it took about 2 hours for me to get into the index.