About Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Also known as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), this technology allows Google to analyze and quantify related keywords within the larger set of content on a web page. Think word synonyms, different word endings, etc. Lots has been speculated about the extent that latent semantic indexing influences ranking.

It is a complex technology, particularly in how it may be implemented. The effect of LSI on your rankings is not well understood, but it means your page may rank better for a related keyword, one that may not even be on the page, than your primary keyword!

Use Keywords in the Following Places

The following are places where keywords should be used on your web pages. The first four items are more important, with Google giving weight to keywords found in the title and link anchor text more than any of the other locations.

• Title: . Keywords should appear as first or second word in the title.

• Link (anchor) text: keywords. The clickable portion of links.

• Headings:

keywords

,

keywords

, etc. Use a stylesheet (CSS file) to control the size of heading text to make it blend in better.

• First paragraph of page (first 20 words):

keywords

Bold and/or italicize keywords also.

• Last paragraph of page:

keywords

• Drop-down boxes:

keywords

• URLs:

• Folder & file names: keywords/keywords.html, keywords.gif

• Image ALT text: for graphical links

Some people abuse H1 tags by wrapping them around entire pages of content or by using multiple H1 tags on a page.

This is a bad idea and borders on spam – the H1 tag should be used as a page headline. It is perfectly legitimate to reduce the size of H1 text using a style sheet but that’s about it. As a result, Google may be discounting H1 so it may carry less weight for ranking moving forward.
The same can be said about image ALT text – some people put entire paragraphs of content in them for each image on a page.

It is perfectly legitimate to put keywords relating to the image but that’s it. Similarly, image ALT text now carries less weight than before. Images that are clickable (wrapped in a HREF link tag) do not appear to have a discounting - yet.

Proper Internal Link Structure

Besides the title of a page, Google places special importance on the use of keywords in the text of links. This means you need to structure your links correctly.

Ideally, you should only use text links on your site as opposed to graphical “button” links. Google looks for keywords contained in link anchor text – the clickable portion of the link. Google cannot see graphics-based links – all it has to go on is the ALT attribute for image tags, which doesn’t carry as much weight.

Keywords in link text should match keywords found on the page that the link points to – especially in the title of the page.

Here is an example of the ideal link structure for Google. Of primary importance is the use of keywords in link anchor text (text between the tags). Note also the use of keywords in the actual name of the graphics file.

Text-Based (Ideal) Link Structure:

your keywords

If you must use graphics-based links on your web pages, be sure and fill in the ALT text attribute of the image tag as follows:

Graphics Link Structure:




What Google Ignores

Google ignores the following elements on your web pages. Due to their abuse and misuse, META tags are a thing of the past with Google!

• Information in the tag

• Information in all other META tags (see META “Description” tag caveat)

• Information within the tag

• Information within the

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Pay Attention To Your Dynamic Page URLs

Many sites today display content dynamically from a database. Common examples include search engines on a site that return directory pages, product pages, shopping cart pages, or news articles. Some content management software also produces pages with dynamic URLs. All dynamic pages can be identified by the “?” symbol in the URL, such as

http://www.mysite.com/products.php?id=1&style=a

Google can crawl and index dynamic pages as long as you don’t have more than 2 parameters in the URL (the example above has two parameters separated by the “&” symbol). Even so, Google may not spider your dynamic pages for some time. Spiders do not want to get caught in a loop of trying to index hundreds of thousands of potential pages.

Google will not follow links that contain session IDs embedded in them.

Specifically, Google will not index pages that include "&id=" in the URL string, whether you actually use session ids or not. This means that if you have a dynamic site that generates multiple-parameter URL strings, you should strongly consider changing your server code to use a string other than "id" for generating dynamic URLs. Don’t use anything that uses "id" anywhere in the string, including sessid, rid, pid,id1, etc.

A simple solution is to create static pages with hard-coded links to your most important dynamic pages whenever possible. You can create a series of sitemap pages just for this purpose. Yes it can be tedious if you have hundreds or thousands of products but it is worth the effort. You want to make it as easy as possible for Google to find all your important pages. This has the added benefit of helping your visitors find a specific product page – be sure and use the product name or keyword in the link text.

URL Rewriting

There more advanced technique involves installing a script on your server that changes a dynamic URL to a static page, whereby each parameter name is translated to a folder name. This method varies by server platform and is something a more experienced webmaster should implement. For the Apache platform, it can be as simple as creating a .htaccess file that contains regular expressions. Do a search on Google and you’ll find a number of ways to do URL rewriting (also called mod rewrite or server rewriting).


All search engines prefer static pages over dynamic pages. If you have a large site with lots of dynamic pages, you should consider URL rewriting, as dynamic pages can take months longer to be indexed and then ranked in Google. And once indexed, Google will not re-crawl dynamic pages as often as static pages.

Keywords in File Names

Although not an important factor, Google does look to see if keywords are used in file names for your web pages, but the overall influence on your ranking is very minute. When naming files, separate each word with a hyphen, otherwise Google will not be able to recognize the phrase and will think it is a single word.
As a general rule of thumb, don’t use more than two hyphens, it looks spammy and Google may take a closer look at your site for other possible issues.


About Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an special file that lists all the pages on your site, whether your content has changed, and that you have added a new page. While this is a neat feature, many sites don't need to use it. Keep in mind that Google will find your site and pages by following links.

With that said, some dynamic sites and other websites that have had problems getting their pages indexed (think Flash) may find it helpful. If your website is well-designed with clean internal links and a standard sitemap page, there is no need to use Google Sitemaps.

Bear in mind that once you are signed up for the Google Sitemaps program, you are committed to updating the Sitemap XML file on a regular basis, which can be a sink on your time.

In this regard, it is somewhat of a crutch for webmasters who have a messy or search engine "unfriendly" site and don't want to change their site. It would be time better served to fix your site so that it can be crawled completely by all the search engines and to employ SEO best practices than continually update an XML file. You may be able to get Google to crawl some of your new pages quicker, but that doesn't mean it will rank your pages any faster.

Remember, having a page in their index doesn't equate to that page being ranked. For more information on the Google Sitemaps program, go to

more information on the Google Sitemaps program, go to

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

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Create Some pages With Content

Websites with lots of pages in general rank better than sites with just a few pages, all other things being equal. It is better to have a 50-page site with short pages than a 5-page site with long, flowing pages. Each page should however contain a minimum of about 200 visible words of text to maximize relevance with Google.

Also, you need pages with real content – don’t create just a lot of “fluff” pages that are standard fare anyway – About Us page, Contact Us page, Our Mission page, etc. Keep your web pages simple. Try to avoid gratuitous animations, junk graphics, large imagemaps, JavaScript, or anything else that may get in the way of Google or, more importantly, of your customers getting the message you are trying to convey.

Break up your pages using and heads, and include your keywords in these heads. Not only will it help visitors read your pages by providing visual separators, it will give your pages more relevance with Google. Don’t create pages that are identical or nearly so in content. Google may consider them to be duplicates and your or site may be penalized. Pages full of high quality, unique, keyword-rich content are a must. Be careful if you use both HTML and PDF versions of the same content. Google will index both.

To prevent this, create a robots.txt file and place it in the main (root) directory on your server. A robots.txt file specifies which directories and file types to exclude from crawling. If your PDF files are duplicates of your HTML files, put all the PDF files in a different directory and specify that this directory by excluded from crawling. For more information on creating a robots.txt file, see

http://www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

Here are some standard pages you should consider for your site:

• Home page
• Your main product, service, or content pages (this is the meat of your site)
• FAQ page(s) (Frequently Asked Questions) or Articles pages
• Sitemap page (links to each page on your site)
• About Us page
• Contact Us page
• Related Links page(s) (discussed later)
• Link to Us page (discussed later)
• Testimonials page
• Copyright, Disclaimers, Privacy Policy page
• Ordering page

Don’t Nest Your Pages Too Deeply

When Google crawls your site, it typically starts at the home page and then follows each link on the page to all your other pages. Google finds your home page in turn from following a link on another website that points to your site. Google seems to attach more importance to files that are closer to the root folder on your server - the folder on your Web server where the home page file is located. Some web designers however may create multiple folders and subfolders on the server for ease in maintaining lots of files.

Google may not value pages located in subfolders as strongly as files located in the root folder. In general, Google doesn’t like to index pages that are more than about three folder levels deep. Ideally, all pages should live in the same folder as your home page or at most be one level deep.

Don’t Bloat Your Pages With Code

Google has a time limit that it sets to crawl sites. If you have a very large site, Google may not have time to crawl all pages during the first pas. This problem can be minimized if you keep the code of your web pages lean and clean.

This also makes your pages download faster, which improves the visitor experience. Studies show that you lose 10% of your visitors for every second it takes your page to load. After about 5 seconds, you might as well forget it – most people will have left your site. Remember there is a still a percentage of people who still use dial-up modems – particularly outside of the US. This will not change real soon, despite the hype over broadband.

Try not to have more code than visible content (text) on your page. Frequently web pages are comprised of over 80% JavaScript code and style code (hard-coded font information or inline style blocks). Right-click a web page and then click View Source – you will be amazed at the amount of code present. Although Google ignores such code, it still takes time for it to wade through to find your content.

Put your JavaScript code in a separate (.JS) file and link to it from the section of each web page, as follows:



In addition, create a stylesheet file (.CSS) file that contains your font information and link to it also.




Stay Away From Frames and Flash

No popular websites use frames and neither should you. Yes, they provide some degree of navigational ease and yes there are workarounds but search engines simply cannot properly crawl framed sites. In addition, visitors can’t bookmark any interior pages of your site or link to them. There are some that still beat this dead horse but framed sites simply have too many negatives to contend with. Don’t do it.

Same goes for sites whose entire home page is a Flash movie. How many times have YOU actually watched a Flash movie when arriving on a home page? If you are like most, you’ve clicked “Skip Intro” as quickly as possible. We are all busy and to wait for a gratuitous Flash movie to download is downright annoying – especially each and every time we visit the site. The only people who care about Flash are Adobe, the Flash developer that you paid, and the CEO or Marketing Director who enjoys it for the coolness factor. Google can index Flash somewhat successfully, but this doesn’t mean it’s going to boost your page ranking or increase sales.
If you must use Flash, confine it to a small location on your page or provide a link to it.

Flash movies that take up the entire web page do have their uses but the home page is not one of them. If you do use Flash on a page, make sure to add the following code:

My keyword-rich content

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Specialized Keyword Phrases Convert Better

The more specialized or targeted your keyword phrase is, the more targeted your audience, the more qualified the potential traffic, and hence the greater the potential sales conversion rate will be on your site. Do not discount keywords just because KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker shows a low traffic value - singly they may not bring much traffic but collectively they can. A large percentage of search is very targeted and specific using multiple words – this is the vaunted “Long Tail”.

Don’t try to rank highly on one-word and even competitive 2-word phrases - instead try 3, 4 and 5-word phrases. These are MUCH easier to rank well for because the majority of your competitors are all chasing the same generic words and aren't thinking about digging deeper. One easy way to get more specific is to put a geographic modifier in the keyword phrase (if applicable to you). If you are a veterinarian in Seattle for example, stop trying to optimize for the competitive “veterinary clinics” phrase and instead try for “Seattle veterinary clinics” since your business is confined to that geographical area anyway.

Put another way, focus on depth, not breadth on your site.

General Keyword Strategy

Now that you have your list of best and most important keyword phrases, here is the general strategy of how to use them on your web pages. Exactly how to optimize your use of keywords on your web pages is the subject of the next section.

The general rule of thumb is that you optimize each page for ideally no more than two different keyword phrases.

Each page should include your Primary Keyword Phrase. Your home page should also contain your best Secondary Keyword Phrase. Each product, service, or content page should also contain the best specific variation to your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Because your home page is generally the one that gets the highest ranking, and is linked to most from other sites, you need to place special emphasis on the use of your Primary Keyword Phrase there. Your home page will then link to other pages on your site that contain (and are optimized for) your other, more specific, keyword phrases.

Using the example again for “house plans”, here would be the general strategy:

• Home page: optimize for “house plans” (primary phrase) and “home plans” (best secondary phrase).

• Country House Plans page: optimize for “country house plans” phrase and any other variations, such as “French country house plans”. Note how these phrases already contain the Primary Keyword phrase within them. This is the ideal situation to achieve.

• French Country House Plans page: optimize for “French country house plans” phrase.

• Contact Us page: include the phrase “house plans” several times on the page. This page, along with the other “fluff” pages, are not really relevant for any specific keyword phrase. So use your Primary Keyword Phrase here.

• About Us page: again, include “house plans” phrase several times on the page for the same reason as the Contact Us page.

This example, while being quite general, nonetheless should give you an idea of how to move forward. Now let’s look at how and where to place keywords on your web site correctly.

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What is your Primary Keyword Phrase?

After using KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker, you should have a great list of keyword phrases. Ideally, you have a single keyword phrase that sticks out from the rest that best represents the category of service, product, or information your website provides. This is your Primary Keyword Phrase and is the one phrase that will be included on all your web pages, particularly on your home page.

In general, this will be your most generic and most competitive phrase, thus it will also be the most difficult to rank well for. You should also have several other phrases that represent more specific or refined variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase. These phrases will be used on your specific product or service pages.

For example, let’s use a website that sells house plans online:

Primary Keyword Phrase: “house plans”
Specific variations: “country house plans”
“luxury house plans”
“Cape Cod house plans”

Notice how the Primary Keyword Phrase is contained within the more specific phrases? This is the ideal situation.

Do not try to go after very broad, generic keywords or single words. Those days are over, won by those that started the SEO game years ago and those that have deep pockets. Realistically, how difficult do you think it would be to get a top ranking for, say “computers”, “mortgages”, “cars”, “travel”, or “insurance”? You’d be competing with millions of other web pages and with websites that are eons more established. So you go for the niches for your riches.

What are your Secondary Keyword Phrases?

After using KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker, you should have a list of phrases that do not have as high of a search (traffic) number as your Primary Keyword Phrase but are nonetheless also relevant. These are your Secondary Keyword Phrases that, while also highly relevant to your website or business, are not searched on as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.

Using the example above, here are some Secondary Keyword Phrases for “house plans”:

Secondary Keyword Phrases: “home plans”
“home designs”
“houseplans”

Secondary Keyword Phrases should also be used on your site, just not as frequently as your Primary Keyword Phrase.

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KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker are online keyword research tool that find all possible variations and permutations of search phrases, including synonyms and common misspellings that people have actually entered into search engines to find sites similar to yours. In addition, they will tell you how many people have actually used that particular search term over time. There are no other programs currently available that offer this much information. There are other tools out there, like the Overture or AdWords Keyword Suggestion tools, but they aren’t near as accurate or as robust and are not recommended for this purpose. Indeed, KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker have been the better-kept secrets for increasing relevant, targeted traffic to websites by analyzing the true search habits of people on the Internet.

Until KeywordDiscovery came around, I used WordTracker exclusively. Now I use KeywordDiscovery as my primary keyword tool as it as a larger and more accurate data set than WordTracker, and better export features. However, WordTracker has several unique features not available in KeywordDiscovery. I encourage you to sign up for either one or both. Each costs about $50 per month, which is a pittance for the wealth of data you will receive. I use both of them on a daily basis.

Before you use KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker, you should first brainstorm and make a list of all possible words and phrases that you think a customer may use to find those products, services, or information that you are offering on your site. Don’t include industry jargon, acronyms, or buzzwords that only experts in your industry or marketers would know. Think like your customer. This is an important distinction to keep in mind.

There simply is no better way to research the best keywords to use for your website. You can also use these tools to estimate beforehand how much traffic you can potentially expect to receive so it is an invaluable tool for general business research.

Step-by-step use of these tools is beyond the scope of this book. I encourage you to read the manuals and become acquainted with the interface and learn how to use these tools effectively. With that said, here are a few pointers I’ve learned over time.

Pay attention to the word form. See whether the plural form or the singular form of a keyword phrase has a higher Search number. This is important as one form of your word will be more important than another.

Don’t get hung up on KEI. Don’t focus too much on the KEI value that KeywordDiscovery or WordTracker provides for keywords. KEI by itself is a very general indicator of competition. It's primary value is in identifying some of the "low-hanging" secondary and tertiary search phrases that you should be able to optimize for fairly easily. So if the high-KEI phrase fits your site, you should optimize for it.

Just because a relevant keyword phrase may have a real low KEI number (like 0) doesn't mean you should ignore it, ESPECIALLY if it is has a high Search value. Don’t be discouraged by a large number of competing pages, you may have less true competition than you think.

Export your results to Excel. KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker allows you to export your research results to Excel, where you can then easily sort (and resort) the data any number of different ways. I highly encourage you to do this.

Both these tools offer you to store keyword Projects online. I find this feature somewhat limiting and typically don’t use them. I’d rather store my data offline on my computer for more advanced manipulation.

Select Overture in Results (WordTracker only). When using WordTracker, I select Google and Overture (bought by Yahoo) in the Competition Search. This is an important feature that WordTracker has. The Overture bid prices are a great indicator of how coveted a given keyword phrase is in the marketplace. Some keyword phrases are so competitive that one can only get traffic from them by going the pay-per-click (PPC) route. The more expensive the keyword in Overture, the more prized it is. By looking at Google and Overture at the same time, it allows you to weigh the Search values against the PPC Bid price for a better determination of the “market value" of a given keyword phrase.

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Keyword Research & Analysis

So What Are Keywords?

In the context of the Web, a keyword is a term that a person enters into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter search phrases that consist of between two and five words. Such phrases may be called search phrases, keyword phrases, query phrases, or just keywords, but they all mean the same thing.

Your most important keywords are those best and most relevant search phrases you want your website to be found for on a search results page in Google. Good keyword phrases are specific and descriptive. It is better to have 100 highly-qualified visitors who find your site listed in Google under a particular search phrase than to have 1,000 visitors who find your site listed under a generic search phrase and then aren’t that interested in what you offer once they get to your site.

Important: Your ultimate objective shouldn’t be just to get lots of traffic to your site from high rankings (although this is important), but instead should be to get a high sales conversion. Having a #1 listing in Google means nothing unless you can convert visitors to your website into satisfied customers or have them at least take a next desired action like filling out a form.

The more targeted and specific your chosen keywords are, the greater the chance that visitors to your site will find what they are looking for. You want a high “click-to-sales” or high “visitors-to-customers” ratio. As such, you need to start thinking like your customers. Determine what it is that they need, what problems they have, and what solutions you can offer to help them.

So how do you determine which keywords are most important and relevant for your website? There are two main methods, as follows:

1. By using an online keyword tools. The gold standards are KeywordDiscovery (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com) and WordTracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). Do this first and spend time doing it right.

2. By analyzing your website traffic statistics. Do this later over time to validate the results of method 1 and to find new keywords.

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Top Things Google Looks For

Although Google looks at over 100 different criteria (which can change in importance over time) for ranking pages, here are the top aspects or elements that are currently deemed a “must-do” if you are serious about a top ranking. Other elements will be discussed later on that are also important. The following are listed in approximate order of importance, with the first two items being more important than the others:

1. Keywords used in link text – both on your site and especially on other websites that point to your site. And the more links you have on other sites that point to your site and that contain your most important keywords, the better, all else being equal.
This is extra important if you are targeting broad, generic or otherwise “competitive” search terms.

2. Keywords used in the title of your Web pages (between the

3. Keywords used in headings (H1, H2) and in the body of your Web pages.

4. The PageRank (PR) of your web pages, which in turn is dependent on the number of links that point to your site from other sites. The importance of these incoming links in turn is dependent on the PageRank of the linking page, which in turn is dependent on the number of incoming links to that page, and so on.

5. Web pages that contain at least 200 words of relevant text content. The more web pages on the site, the better chance of ranking well for a larger number of keyword phrases.

6. How often the content on your site is updated. You should update your site once a month if possible.

7. How fast you are obtaining new links (too many links too fast is a bad thing).

8. How old the site is, how old individual web pages are, and how old links to a site are. In general, the older the site and the older a link is, the better. So don't wait unnecessarily before launching a new site, a new page or obtaining new links to your site.

Put simply, to rank well on Google, you need to optimize your website for your best keywords, get as many important and relevant sites to link to your site as you can, make sure the text of those links contain your best keywords, and don't do anything that looks "excessive", "unnatural", “manipulative” or “spammy” to Google. Keep it looking natural and act as if the search engines didn’t exist.

Important: You should also read the Google Patent Papers. In them are additional factors that Google may look at in determining rankings. For more information, see Appendix C for the link.

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How Google Ranks Pages

Google uses a sophisticated and proprietary algorithm for ranking Web sites that uses over 100 different criteria in the calculation, each of which is given a specific weighting which can change over time. Because the algorithm can change, specific techniques that used to work well may no longer work as well over time. This is important to remember when your site’s ranking seems to change for no apparent reason. For this reason, optimizing your site should not be considered as a one-time task. You should always try, test, and refine your efforts.

The Google algorithm can be broken down into two major groups of factors:

On-page (keyword) factors. Keyword factors involve how, where and when keywords are used. Meaning how well your website is optimized for your most important keywords, and if those same keywords appear in your content and in links. Keyword factors determine page relevance.

Off-page (link) factors. These include the quantity and quality of links that point to your site. Link factors determine page importance and are related to Google PageRank (PR). Links play a VERY important role in getting high rankings, particularly for competitive markets.

Very simply put, Google finds pages in its index that are both relevant and important to a search for a particular term or phrase, and then lists them in descending order on search results pages.

On-Page Factors and Page Relevance

Keywords are intrinsically related to search terms – words and phrases that people enter into a search engine to find specific information. Most people enter 2 to 5-word phrases in Google to find what they are looking for. Google in turn analyzes all pages in its index and lists the pages which contain those search terms. Each web page usually contains one or two keywords that are repeated more often than others throughout the site. These keywords dictate the “theme” of a website.

In addition, Google analyzes other sites that contain links to your site. Specifically, Google looks to see if the text of a link (the clickable portion) that points to your site also contain those same keywords.

Off-Page Factors and Page Importance

Page importance is all about links - their quantity, quality, and strength, which we will discuss later on. This part of the algorithm includes Google PageRank (PR).

Google looks for links that point to your site from other websites. Google believes a link from website A to website B is a “vote” for the importance of website B. In this way, other websites add votes for your website, which in turn helps increase a pages PageRank value on your site. Each page on your site has a PR value. Usually the PR value is the highest for the home page as most people will link to your home page rather than another page on your site.

The more web pages that link to your site, and the more important in turn those pages are, the more important Google thinks your site is and hence the higher your PageRank value. Moreover, it is the quality, as well as the quantity, of links that matter – not all links are valued the same. Keep in mind that PageRank is but a single (albeit important) factor used in ranking.

Sites that are highly optimized for on-page factors can outrank sites that are less optimized but have higher PageRank. PageRank value is assigned after comparing every page in the Google index against one another. This is billions and billions of web pages. Note that PageRank does NOT factor in keywords or phrases used on your site.

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When Google Comes Visiting

To be listed in Google’s search database (or index), Google visits your site using automated programs called robots or spiders. Such programs “read” each and every page of your website, starting typically with your home page and then following each link to all other web pages on your site. When a search engine robot or spider visits your site, it is said to crawl or spider your site.

Important: Google will not add a new web page to its index unless there is at least one other web page in its index that links to that page. So don’t fret over submitting your site to Google directly. Instead, you need to get another website to link to your website first.


Website crawls are performed by the main Google spider, called Googlebot. The more “popular” your site, the more often it typically is crawled by Google. Highly ranked sites and sites that update content frequently (like news and blog sites) get crawled daily.

If interested, you can check your server log files for the user-agent “Googlebot”. This will tell you when Google crawls your site. You can also check by IP address although this method is not as accurate as Google uses different IP addresses for their robots, which can change over time.
Google updates its main index more or less continuously although major “updates” still happen several times a year. These major updates correspond to major ranking algorithm changes. These updates have all been named – you may have heard about Florida, Bourbon, Allegra or Jagger in the forums.

For new websites, I advise you to make your site live as quickly as possible, even before you are completed. Given that Google prefers sites that are older, it no longer makes sense to wait until every "i" is dotted and "t" is crossed before going live with a new site. Instead, create an overall skeleton of your site, with a reasonably finished Home page and other important pages and make it live. Add new content, or update the content, on at least a monthly basis. Google also prefers sites that add or update content regularly.

This strategy has to do with what is called the Google Sandbox or the aging factor. The Sandbox is a set of filters applied to new websites whereby the site cannot rank well (or at all) for any competitive keywords for 6 – 24 months. Also called the aging delay. New sites can rank well for very niche, unique keyword phrases, such as their company name, but that’s about it. It is for this reason that new sites need to be made live on the Web as soon as possible in order to “start the aging clock”.

Important: It is critical that your website is up and running when Google visits you by following a link from another site. If your site is down, your listing on Google may disappear until the next update! The reason is that Google thinks your site doesn’t exist and may remove it from the index after a couple of attempts.

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So What Is A Ranking ?

A ranking on a search engine is a web page’s listing and relative placement on a results page (known as a SERP) for a certain search query. As an example, if you type “house plans” into the search box at Google, you will get those listings displayed (10 listings per page by default) that Google deems most relevant to the search phrase house plans, sorted in order of relative importance.

The most relevant and most important web pages are listed in descending order. For Google, page relevancy is dependent on how well a web page “matches” a specific word search. Page importance on the other hand is dependent on the quality and quantity of links that point to your web page from other websites. The concept of link quality is important and will be discussed in a later chapter.

If your site does not appear in the top 20 for your most important keywords (search terms), you might as well forget getting much traffic from Google or from any other search engine. Because many people never go past the first page for a search result, you really need to be in the top 10.
It is debatable how much more traffic a #1 ranking gets compared to say, a #3 or a #10 ranking. Those listings “above the fold” on a page (anything higher than #4 or #3 depending on your monitor size and resolution) do get clicked more than those below the fold. Above the fold is anything displayed on the page before you have to start scrolling downward.

A recent study provides some interesting numbers on the subject of ranking vs. percentage of clicks for that position. This study tracked the number of times people clicked on a listing on Google for a given search query:

First Page:
1st position: 30%
2nd position: 15%
3rd position: 7%
4th position: 5%
5th position: 4%
6th position: 4%
7th position: 2%
8th position: 2%
9th position: 3%
10th position: 5%

Second Page:
1stt position: 6%
2nd position: 4%
3rd position: 2%
4th position and beyond <1%

As you can see, if you aren’t on the first two pages, you might as well forget getting clicked. When was the last time you went to the third page of a search query versus just starting a new search query?

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The Importance Of Google

Google also currently provides search results to other “partner” search engines and directories. This means a # 1 ranking on Google will most likely land you a # 1 ranking on these partner sites as well! I say “likely” because the partner sites tend to blend their results a little bit so the rankings across the partners may not be exact.

Specifically, a # 1 ranking on Google for a specific search term also means a # 1 ranking on AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, CompuServe, Lycos, iWon.com, Go.com and AT&T Worldnet! With its partners included, Google alone is responsible for powering over 70% of all search engine traffic to websites.

Clearly, Google is where you need to focus your website promotion efforts first. After you have applied the techniques discussed, have monitored your results, and then refined your efforts over time, you should start seeing dramatic results. The two other major search engines of importance – Yahoo and MSN Search, look for the same things as Google in terms of ranking sites. So if you get it right for Google, you have also gotten it right in general for the other search engines!

How Google Works

Google, like other search engines, uses automated software to read, analyze, compare, and rank your web pages. So you need to know what elements and factors Google cares about, and how important these factors are in relation to each other.

This is an important concept: Google uses automated software that looks at code and text, not human beings. This means the visual elements of your website that may matter to you – like layout, color, animation, Flash, and other graphics, are ignored by Google. The Google search engine is like a blind person reading a book in Braille – anything that is graphical, spatial, or visual in nature is simply not seen. As such, you need to start thinking like the Google search engine.

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