Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

So it's Monday again and we're now less than 100 days out from Christmas. Of course that means that if you're marketing anything with a Christmas theme you should be at least getting into the planning stage for the pages or sites you want to use in that marketing.

Man how things have changed ... it's not that long ago that if you were still planning a Christmas-related site in mid-September you were already too late. It's only a few years ago that if you wanted to tap into the Christmas market the website you were going to use needed to be completed and on line by mid June if you wanted the search engines to find you and list you in time for the Christmas rush.

Of course these days things have changed and if you know what you're doing you can get a new page on an existing website indexed within hours of it going live and you can have a whole new site experience it's first brush with Googlebot almost as quickly.

While that's all well and good for more experienced webmasters I know that there are plenty of others out there who are struggling to get a listing that's even close to being on page one of Google's search results. Many have absolutely no clue and never bother to try and discover what they have to do to get a good listing.

Others run from one crazy scheme to another ... follow one "expert" after another ... in an effort to obtain good listings and ultimately all they manage to do is to totally destroy their chance of obtaining that good listing they're so desperate to get.

They fail to see the value of doing their own testing ... working to discover what actually works for them and what doesn't. Instead they sit back and expect to have all the answers handed to them ... and there are plenty of "experts" out there who will give you all the advice you need ... to fail miserably.

So if you're one of those who want good listings in the search engines but aren't prepared to do your own testing then I have to say that ultimately you're going to fail. However, if you are prepared to do some work for yourself here is some information that will give you something of a head start on your journey in search of good listings in the search engines.

Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. ... a well-known mainstream SEO company ... claims that there are 250 different factors that Google looks at when it ranks a web page or website and he says that he knows every one of them.

On the other hand Eric Schmidt ... the really public face of Google ... says that there are 200 factors that Google looks at when ranking your page or site. He's not about to disclose even one of them to anyone outside of Google because he says that many of those ranking factors change on a regular basis.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land agrees with Eric Schmidt that there are 200 ranking factors and he agrees that many of them do change on a regular basis ... but he also says that there are 50 ranking factors in Google's algorithm that have never changed.

So what are those 50 ranking factors that have never changed? Well Sullivan doesn't say and I'm not sure that I could name those 50 but I will give you a few that are very important and when you have those built into your websites you can then start to do some testing and before long you'll be expanding on them.

Keywords in the text
Now if that sounds like a no-brainer then I have to tell you that it is but I've included it because ... well ... because I've seen hundreds of web designers who pass themselves off to clients as SEO experts and who never include a single important keyword or keyword phrase in the text on the sites that they build.

I know that seems hard to believe but it's true ... there are lots of SEO wannabe's out there who don't understand one of the most fundamentally important factors you need to address if you want a good search engine listing.

Keywords in the title tag
Yes, that's another basic fundamental of search engine optimisation. You need to incorporate your important search terms in the title tag. It's another no-brainer and everyone should know it but once again they don't and you will see all manner of irrelevant rubbish in the title tag of many sites.

Linking using keywords
This one is almost as equally well-known as the other two tips. If you have a page about blue widgets and you want to give it the best chance of ranking well in the search engines then use the term 'blue widgets' in the link in your site's navigation that people have to click on to get to the page.

If you're linking to that page from another site then use the 'blue widgets' term as the link people have to click on to be taken to the blue widgets page on your website.

Inbound links
While it is not impossible to get a website to rank well in the search engines without any links pointing to that site it is a heck of a lot easier to get a site to rank well if other sites are linking to it. You need to remember that Google sees every inbound link as a vote for the website that the link is pointing to so it will make your quest for a good search engine ranking much easier if you can get some inbound links from other sites.

Of course in adult we tend to get lots of inbound links but they don't all point to the same page ... you would see a lot of free sites rank quite well if every link list pointed to the one index page. In mainstream it's a little easier and you can do some quick and dirty link development using mainstream directories but you may need to do a whole lot more if you're working with some very competitive search terms in areas where lots of people are fighting for the top spots.

So there are just a few tips to get you started on your search engine optimisation journey. It's a journey you will never complete and at times it will be a struggle but it will be interesting and sometimes the rewards can be great.