10 Ways To Raise Your Site In Google

And in other search engines, too

No matter how much some people claim the SEO industry is a den of snake-oil

salesmen, there are still definite ways webmasters can improve their rankings,

and thus their visibility in Google's search results.

This isn't a manipulation game—Google absolutely hates that game and will punish

you for it—which is perhaps what the darker element of the SEO world sells.

Good, in-bounds SEO is made up of smart, user-and-search-engine friendly

techniques. Think of SEO as a performance-enhancing drug—one that won't get you

kicked out of baseball.

That being said, there are tons of things webmasters can do to help their sites

perform better in search, so this list is not by a long shot finished. It is,

though, what we think are the top ten strategies for better search engine—and by

"search engine" I mean "Google" – placement.

1. Title tags

Listed by others as one of the Big Three (tags, links, and text), we're putting

title tags at the top. The words in the title tag appear in the link that pops

up in the search result. This is where you tell the search engine (and the

would-be visitor) as succinctly as possible what needs to be known: company or

publication name; relevant, targeted keyword or keyword phrase taken from the

text of the page. Each page should have a title tag as Google ranks each page

individually, not the site in its entirety.

2. Content

The order of the Big Three is very debatable, but really they work as parts of

the whole; not one of them can be left out if the machine is to work properly.

In this case, you probably understand that content should be quality, however

that is defined, but it should also be rich in the keywords you are targeting to

drive search traffic. That doesn't mean just throwing them in there like you're

cooking up a pot of SEO gumbo, though. Keyword use and keyword variation should

be natural and not overstuffed. For the visual text part of the page, focus on

working in the relevant words and phrases you want people to find you for.

3. Quality Links

Or more specifically, back links, links to your site from outside sources. Links

are your letters of recommendation. If nobody's recommending you, or the

recommendations seem phony, then it won't work. Authority links are weighted

most heavily, of course, so try to get industry-related authority sites to link

to your site.

4. Quantity Links

Authority (high quality) links are by nature more difficult to get, so you'll

have to start somewhere else unless you already have the brand recognition you

need from square one. Many SEOers propose "link-swaps" to each other and it used

to be common trade to buy and sell links. But as Google demonstrated last Fall,

you can't buy Google's love that way. In fact, you'll get the opposite of love.

So, try to get as many links as you can from industry peers the good

old-fashioned way – by promoting. Submit links to respected directories like

DMOZ and Yahoo, as well. A large burst of low-quality, non-authoritative, or

bad-neighborhood links, though, can do a lot more harm than good; so keep things

natural.

5. URL

The importance of the URL is often debated, but one argument seems to make more

sense than the others. Search engines don't like too many parameters in the URL

(easy to confuse the spiders with & and ?) and people can't read those long URLs

and tell what they mean at a glance either. The people aspect here is especially

important, because they're the ones clicking and they need to understand where a

link leads them at a millisecond glance. Lesson: keywords in the URL are a good

idea.

6. Spider Food

Search spiders eat HTML, not Flash. They eat text, not pictures. Make the

spiders happy with HTML and lots of text to eat.

7. Site Architecture

There's a lot to consider here, but the goal is creating a site spiders can

easily access, a site that tells them where to go and what to index. Sitemaps

are vital for this purpose, as is proper use of Robots.txt.

8. Frequently Updated Content

You could start a site, slap some content on it, and let it sit there in cyber

space. It'll be indexed, most likely. But you really expand your credibility as

a devoted, relevant source if you update regularly. In addition to spiders, it

gives people a reason to come back, too.

9. Start a Blog

A great way to establish yourself as an authority voice on the Internet is to

start a blog about the industry you're in. Maintaining a blog means another

entry point with regularly updated content that eventually with some authority

helps pull up the main site via targeted links to the site, or specific pages

within the site. It's not a spam blog, which will be zapped eventually, if

there's useful content on it and legitimate linking.

10. Don't Forget Humans

This is so important, it probably should be higher up on the list. There's an

art to designing a site that is friendly to both Google crawlers and the people

you ultimately want to convert. Without people, what's the point? So first

design for them, and then tweak to please the spiders, not the other way around.

Jakob Nielsen is a usability guru you'll want to check out. He's been telling

people how make user-centric websites since web directories were still

phonebooks—you know, on paper.

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