Search Engine Optimization For Google In The Here And Now

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The year 2007 is upon us. Sergey Brin is married now, and soon he’ll have more mouths to feed. So Google is commercial in its’ entirety, and the web has changed forever. How do we approach this task of rising to the top of the mercurial, yet all important G-Beast? Well, I’ve been examining this very situation, and I think I’ve found some principles that really do work

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First off, let’s dispel some popular myths about Google

• Google’s algo is almost entirely based on backlinks. Incorrect. Google’s algo is very receptive to concepts like relevancy, on-page optimization, and your “link neighborhood”. It’s overly simplistic to bang the “links are everything mantra.”
• Google uses a “time-delay” on links. No. It pretty much can be proven that Google is examining all links now on the basis for age, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you acquire a link with “perfect anchor text” it will be “put on ice” for some period of time. There are other factors at work making it look like this.
• Getting rankings in Google “takes time”. No. You can’t afford to be patient when commerce is at stake.
• Webmastering mistakes are no big deal. Nope! They’re a bigger deal than you can imagine. Make sure you have basic issues sorted or you’ll get bit in the ass at some point.

The biggest problem when people talk about rankings drops is they generally confuse the concepts of phrase-based penalties, domain-wide penalties, and other issues such as webmastering issues and “not doing enough to rank”.

Principles which are currently getting high ranks for me in Google

• Avoid duplicate content from the beginning. If you’re launching a new website, make sure you prevent duplicate content from the beginning if you can.
• Read up on canocalization and learn how to set your 301 redirect. This will save you a lot of headache later on
• Use RSS feeds extensively. Ping the blogosphere evertyime you update. Your website doesn’t have to be a blog to use RSS, you can convert almost any website.
• Promote your new articles in the social news sphere. You need promotion to get trusted links. If you can get trusted links to deep content articles, your domain trust will thank you for it, making it easier to rank for related documents.
• Be clever with your site structure. Make sure to use a sitemap on your website and also submit an XML sitemap to Google sitemaps.
• Get your domain up and running fast. Don’t “incubate a domain” waiting for it to wake up later. new Google search engine patents make it clear that Google is very interested in the “rate” at which a website makes content and acquires links. If I were a betting man, I’d say they want you to make content AND get links at a consistent and quick rate. The rate is compared to how other websites operate in your neighborhood.
• Your visitor is king. Make a useful visitor experience. If your website is too low quality, then personalization efforts like iGoogle are bound to cut into your quality score, which could hurt rankings.

Google hasn’t changed that much, even though there are a number of distinct differences

In fairness to Google, I still think that anyone can rank well in Google, as long as they use a carefully planned and consistent strategy. Personally, I don’t see how you can afford to avoid blogging and the social news sphere if you’re looking to expand rankings.

What other principles do you see at work these days?

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