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Climbing Mount Google

Written by: Elliot Jones

Article Overview: A simple guide looking into some of the factors Google and other search engines use to determine search engine positions and your website ranking in the search engine results pages.

Climbing Mount Google

Climbing Mount Google…

I thought that it would be helpful to put together a piece giving you a few pointers on getting your site up the search engine rankings and, as 9 out of every 10 site visits come from search engines, a first page position on Google is where everyone interested in increasing their site traffic should be looking.

Before doing anything, you’ll need a strategy. Find out where you’re currently performing well, and where you’re falling short of the competition and make a list of keywords that will drive relevant visitors to your site – remember, there’s no point being number one for a keyword with no traffic.

Next, look at your site. You’ll need it to be readable for the ‘spiders’ that search engines send out to gather information on websites. Validating your site (for W3C) is a great start, and getting your keywords into SEO hotspots like the page title, meta description and h1 tags will help ensure the spiders see them as important. Most importantly, get good quality copy on your site. A blog or FAQ is an ideal way to get the ball rolling, and add to it regularly to get the spiders returning frequently.

Finally, you need other sites linking to yours; a good link is the most important aspect of SEO, and quality is the key. There are loads of factors that come into play, but a well written, relevant article with links back to your site will tick most of the boxes.

Remember, SEO is an ongoing activity, and it can take a good 8-12 months to really see the results… but they’re worth the wait. Check my bio for more information.

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Article Tags: 12 months, being number one, blog, boxes, google, h1, hotspots, meta description, page position, pointers, quality copy, relevant article, search engine rankings, search engines, spiders, traffic, w3c



Related Forum Posts
How Do You Check Google Ranking? - Now that Google is so responsive to your own search history, how can you get a good idea of what your Google ranking really is for your web pages? Whenever I check my ranking for specific keywords on Google, my web pages appear on the front page, or suspiciously high. My way around this is to check Google ranking via other computer Internet links, i.e., whenever I'm working in a library I will use a library computer to check. I check Google ranking before logging into my Gmail or other Google-related accounts. Does anybody else have any other tips for discovering your Google ranking? Nowadays, I check Bing.com for my webpage ranking as it gives a much less favourable (and so, I guess, "truer") ranking for my webpages than Google does...
Re: Cool Video - How Google Updates it's Search Algorithm - Great Video Evan! As per the recent Google Algorithm update. Google also give more value to content and even shows rich snippet in Google SERP's.
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - HI Evan, Look forward to hearing more. I like the point that you brought out with "testing." Google has some amazing tools that can help website owners track everything. From Google Adsense reporting to Google Analytic to Google Conversion and most recently Google Goal Tracking. Between all of those tools a website owner should know exactly what type of traffic is converting & making them money and what type of traffic is not. I even use Google PPC to estimate organic search engine traffic! Website owners would do well to follow your lead and create a base, and then test off that base in regards to advertising. Jeff
Re: Readers, Money or SEO? Which comes first? - Hi Chris, I like your passion on the subject; I would have to agree with you on this one. Our company is finding Google is starting to look at content more. Links & Link Value are far more important....but Google is giving link value to sites that have quality content. I read a leaked report from Google a while back that explained how Google manually reviews sites. They have 1,000's of outsourced employees that go through sites one by one and rank them on many different levels. Once a site like Mashable is ranked a certain way, that value sticks with them. That is why no matter what Mashable, techcrunch, Amazon, etc... put out they rank well for. Obviously they all have incredible links but Google has given them link value based on who they are. Obviously the idea of quality content is nothing new, just seems like it has gotten lost in the SEO world. Jeff
Re: Domain name sugestion - On the dashes question, I just did a test on my own site, Grasp-The-Nettle.com and found I got the following results: grasp the nettle = 6th on page 1 of Google graspthenettle = 5th on page 1 of Google grasp-the-nettle = 6th on page 1 of Google It doesn't seem to make much difference.


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