A friend of mine recently informed me that he has been on a course to learn about how search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) works. He also told me that some of my websites were very poorly designed as they did not use meta tags and they were not well optimized. He apparently did some checking on my websites whilst in attendance at the course.
Hectic, learning how to game Google (Let’s face it, nobody is really concerned with any other search engine)
It never ceases to amaze me what people will spend perfectly good money on, then again there is enough involved to make a course and there are many ways of gaming Google, if you are into unethical and devious schemes to promote your keyword… Maybe the correct answer is for the rocket scientists at Google to notice the particular targeting of keywords and long tails.
I wholeheartedly agree with Jonathan Leger where he blogs that incoming links are still the best way to rank on Google. He goes on to speculate and discuss the idea that Google Authorship, through Google Plus, may in future be used by Google to determine the weight your content has in terms of authority. Throughout, he blogs that everything can be gamed anyway but what he does not say or discuss is how bad it would be if Google ever uses Google Plus for web page authority.
So, just how do you get to the top of the first page of Google for your keyword(s)
Anyway, here is a simple 3 step method (that could also just be one step method) for ranking number one for any keyword in order of importance:
1. Have the very best and well known expert in the keyword field write a top article about the keyword, publish the article in recognized, known and respected publications with a link to your website and rinse and repeat with different and new content, same keyword and same website.
2. Constantly produce high quality, relevant and trending content related to your keyword and ensure that you have more and stronger incoming links than the current number one ranked website.
3. Don’t do anything evil
The very basics are hopefully already done by your content system:
1. Each page must have a name (In meta tags, a title tag)
2. Each page must at least have a description or heading (in HTML, an h tag)
3. Each page must at least parse error free html, as this also reflects on your web page quality
You do not have to have extensive meta tags at all, but the basics are always a bonus, I have seen some Adobe webpages with a Google page rank of 8 that have almost no meta tags and they still rank numero Uno AND number two AND number three, etc. that is what an extremely powerful and authoritative website can do for anyone.
Bottom line is quality, content, incoming links, nothing evil and more so than the current number one.
Anything evil is any relationship to link farms, incoming links from dubious places (that sell links – never purchase or pay for links), weird SEO or overly developed meta tags a stuffed Description tag or stuffed Keywords tag. Google does not need your meta tags anymore like it used to so many years ago. Also remember that the Google search algorithm is something living and if you are chasing that 5 percent keyword best you have many test sites and testbeds on less valuable keywords so that you can track the cutting and bleeding edge changes although quality and extremely strong incoming links should always outperform any other cosmetic enhancement…