I know, I know ( I’m trying hard not to say it – especially to a future potential client of SEOptimum) – but sorry, here goes, “Do ya feel lucky punk? Do ya?” I’m afraid luck ain’t going to cut it in the Search Engine rankings today!

Let SEOptimum make your day!

A decade ago it was pretty simple to get your web site on page #1 of Google – even unintentionally – knowing only the tiniest information on what search engines liked to see on your site.

But those were also the days of widespread ‘gaming’ of the system, cheating!

Examples were things as simple as filling a page with the desired Search Term hundreds of times and then making that text the same colour as the background so while search engines could see it ( they read pages by the code that lies behind what we see in our browsers) the visitor couldn’t.

In fact any way of getting Google to see the site differently from the actual page visitor was the favoured ‘Black Hat‘ technique.

Even today many so called Marketers are still searching for ‘Tricks’ and ‘Loopholes’ to con their way to an undeserved page ranking on page #1 of Google – crazy!

The fact is that Google wants just ONE thing for its users: that the results that show up when you or I type in a search term into the box are the best they can be, and are relevant to what we are looking for.  They employ a lot of very smart people to help them do that and since it’s what WE want too, or should be, why would we want to try and cheat?

Here are some of the things Google checks on sites and so ranks them accordingly in a constantly changing and evolving way ( don’t forget your site is indexed and re-indexed constantly). It’s called their Algorithm and it’s a secret sauce of likes and dislikes that decide how your site, and pages within that site, rank in the Google results pages. Only a select few know all the ingredients but here are a few basics that most good SEO guys agree on:

• Domain age: Older sites get a little more respect than new ones
• Amount of content: highly unlikely you’ll find a 1,2 or 3 page site on page #1
• Actual search term related content: Is the phrase being searched for to be found in the page Title, Body Content, Source Code? In other words ‘On Site SEO‘ is the page/site optimised for this search term?
• How long do people stay on the page? Oh yes Google knows! If people click away then Google knows that page is not what they were looking for so will be marked down for that particular search term. On the other hand if people stay on the page for a short while Google assumes they’ve found something relevant – Hurrah!
• Do visitors look at more than one page while they are on your site? Another indicator that your content is relevant.
• Do your images have accurate ALT tags ( i.e. descriptive text) for those surfers with images turned off?
• Does the site have ‘business’ pages? Like a Privacy Policy, a Contact Page with a telephone number and a physical address, an About Us page – these all show Google that you have a business-like site.
• Do other similar sites link to your site?
• Do Authority Sites link to your site?
• Do those links appear ‘natural’? - or did you suddenly get 1000 backlinks over night ( tut tut!)
• Is there interactivity on the site? For example: Blog comments
• Is the content updated fairly regularly? The more it is the more often you get indexed, the more you are indexed the higher you rank, simples!
  
• Is the site ‘crawler’ friendly? Google likes its search bots to be able to quickly find their way around all the pages of a site – they like it therefore when your site has a SiteMap Page. If the bots can’t find a page it won’t be indexed so no searcher will ever find it. Your site sure but that page, no.
• How fast does your site take to load? No massive image files or poor coding please!

and on and on… there are no doubt hundreds of other components in the Google Algorithm and this small sample shows just how smart Google is and what they know about your site, its history and everything your visitors do when they pay you a visit. It’s pretty mind boggling.

So unlike the old days when any ‘chancer’ could game the system, today SEO Consultants who know what they are about work hand in hand with Google instead of trying to mug them – because Google says it’s wrong and get it wrong and you will pay!

Or are you feeling lucky?

Posted from Hammersmith, England, United Kingdom.

So here’s my interpretation of Matrix SEO and what I believe the Red Pill, Blue Pill stuff is all about and how this relates to you (HINT: it doesn’t matter which pill you take as long as I take the right one on your behalf!)

So, what does the Red Pill do?

It allows us to see the reality of the Internet and understand that everything on it is interconnected – much like the theory of ‘six degrees of separation‘ which states that every human is at most 6 connections away from any other human being on the planet through a series of personal acquaintances.

Now whether that hypothesis is true and actually proven I don’t know but it may well be true when applied to all the web sites in the world being somehow linked to each other.

That can cause some ramifications when you are doing Search Engine Optimisation to rank your site higher in Google and Yahoo/Bing.

The thing about Search Engines is if no other site, not one, links to you in some way the chances of your web site being ‘indexed’ by Google are pretty remote. Google sends little ‘bots‘ around the web collecting information and the roads those bots travel are the ‘links’ between web sites and web site pages.

No Link = No Road – and your site is in the wilderness never to be found by anybody ‘searching’ the web.

By the same token Google regards the number of links going into your site as a sign of your importance, or lack thereof and this is reflected in where your site ranks for relevant search terms. BUT Google also likes to see that those links coming to you are from sites either related to your content, or from sites is perceives as being ‘authoritative’ – CNN or the BBC for example.

However if your site is mentioned and linked to from a boat load of Porn sites Google might not be so impressed.

And there’s the problem right there…

Google knows where your links have come from ( it’s how they found you after all) and if you get a lot of links from ‘bad neighbourhoods’ Google will rank you down. So lets say a SEO Consultant finds a really cool site, maybe a .gov or .edu site that has high PR ( i.e. Google’s Page Ranking factor of a web site’s importance: 0-10) and puts your link on it that’s great right?

Sure is – until every Spammer in the world discovers the same site and smothers it with links to Viagra sites ( eerm remember the Blue pill?)

Suddenly that backlink isn’t looking quite as advantageous is it?

That is why, here at SEOptimum, we ensure that this doesn’t happen by only allowing direct back links to your site from ‘authority’ sites and ‘nice neighbourhoods’ or sites where we have total control over the content.

Then we find that cool site the other SEO guy found and put a link there not to your site but to the page on one of the ‘nice’ sites where your backlink sits. By giving that page more juice it will become more important in Google’s eyes so the ‘safe’ backlink on it will hold more weight and your site will benefit from that.

Now if, as in the previous scenario, that ‘cool’ site goes ‘rogue’ then the backlink won’t be pointing directly to you – this is one degree of separation that is very useful.

Posted from Hammersmith, England, United Kingdom.