Optimizing a new site for google can be one of the most challenging, time consuming, pride swallowing, gut wrenching tasks imaginable. For an established site it can be a walk in the park. Why does google do this to new sites? What’s the point? It’s simple, they want to reduce spam. Below are most of the factors involve when optimizing for google.
*Important – Google’s algorithm is heavily based on Off-Page factors. It’s not the shear number of links that matter. It’s the quality of those links.
H1 Tags - The main topic of your page should be your H1 tag, the closer to the top of the page, the better.
Title Tags - 2-3 of your main keywords should appear in your Title Tag per page. Make sure each page has unique title tags. The first words of your page title count the most.
Bold, Underlined, and Italic Text - Don’t overdue it, but try and utilize these features throughout your content.
Keywords in the URL - Google, as of late, seems to have lessened the significance of hyphenated URL’s. Don’t get us wrong there are a ton out there that rank very well. The one’s that do rank well are larger established sites. Getting a new site to rank well in Google with a hyphenated URL is getting tougher and tougher.
Keywords in the filename - Google likes keywords in the filename of the interior pages of your site.
Meta Keywords - Almost a non-existent dinosaur of search ranking factors. They probably carry some weight but we’ve seen countless high ranking sites that don’t use them at all.
Alt Image Tags - Used for the visually impaired and low-bandwidth connections. Alt tags can be used to increase or decrease the keyword density of a page. Use them to describe images. Don’t get fancy.
Keyword Density - Google loves keyword rich content but it’s hard to write naturally and stay under their 2%-4% guideline. A good rule of thumb. Write the content naturally and then use the tags above to adjust the density.
Link Anchor Text - Just like all other search engines, Google will rank you higher for a specific keyword if you have those keywords in the link or anchor text of the inbound link. Probably the most important ranking factor for all search engines. If you have a choice. Try to get as many variations as possible.
Inbound Links from Varying IP’s - Get as many as you can but make sure the links you get aren’t largely based on one set of IP addresses. In other words, if you have a bunch of sites only link them together where it makes sense. Themed related links seem to get the most value.
Site wide links - Google seems to only regard the first link highly and then gradually decreases the value.
Strong Internal Link Structure - Google loves sites that are easy to crawl and thematically related to the content of the receiving page. So create a site that allows “Googlebot” to jump in and out easily. Internal links can become very powerful with the right amount of inbound links.
Linking Out to Authority Sites - Yet another theory states that google favors sites that link out to authority sites. We favor linking to sites based on personal preferance. Do they have a good site? Link to them. That’s what the internet is all about.
Smaller vs. Larger Sites - Google loves large established content rich sites. Smaller sites can achieve high rankings with the right amount of inbound links but without the content, you still won’t get much traffic.
DMOZ Directory - The largest human edited directory which propagates to the google directory. If you can get your targeted keywords into your listing at DMOZ, you’re almost assured a great ranking for that keyword in google.
Original Content - Don’t copy text from other sites. Take a look at the competition for ideas but stay away from copying even whole sentences. SE’s are cracking down on duplicate content and you’ll be penalized severely.
Proper HTML and Code - Make sure to keep your code clean. This will ultimately help SE spiders navigate your site and possible help in your rankings. There is a good validation tool located here W3.org
Posted under Google SEO
This post was written by admin on August 29, 2008
