Internet Marketing - Optimising Your Website For Google

Writen by MarkD McCormack

Off page factors

Google relies heavily on off page factors when ranking websites. The most important thing you can have, is a number of good quality backlinks to your site. The quality of the links will be measured by the Page Rank of the site that links to you and the relevance of the anchor text on the back link. If your site is about car maintenance and you have a PR7 backlink to your site, it will not pass the relevance test if the anchor text refers to pasta recipes. It has been said that Google likes up to 100 links, but I have seen cases where is ranks sites well when they have significantly more. One way or another, always prioritise quality over quantity. Google also does not like link churn, so keep your links as stable as possible. This is related to the next factor.

Site Age

Google prefers older sites to younger sites. There is quite a debate among SEO professionals about how fair this is, but the stoics amongst us know that debate is healthy, but it is, what it is! Many people who create a new site find it very difficult to get a ranking in Google, even though they may have a superior site. This has led to talk of a Google sandbox, where new sites are put until Google considers them mature enough to give a ranking to. If you are building a new site, you could consider buying an existing URL which has a PR score of 4+. This will by-pass any time you would spend in the sandbox. Otherwise, you will find that getting ranked by Google is much slower than other engines. Similarly, links mature with Google over time, and many may not be recognised by Google for some time. You need to play a long game with Google ranking for this reason and to have other Internet Marketing strategies in place to bring traffic to your site while you are waiting to be ranked.

On Page Factors

These are less important for Google than for other search engines. Google does read meta tags, alt tags, etc., and it looks for keyword prominence and keyword density. However because of past manipulation of these factors, it pays a lot less attention to them than it used to. In fact if your pages were optimised in the past, it may be that you want to de-optimise some of these pages as you may be punished for trying to manipulate the results.

Size

Google prefers big sites to small sites.

There are also a number of factors that can damage your ranking with Google and so need to be avoided. The most important include:

Affiliate Sites - These are duplicate sites with little unique content.

Linking To Bad Neighborhoods – Common when using link farms

Over-optimisation – Excessive manipulation of on page factors. If you want to guidance on keyword densities for your sector, take a look at high ranking sites, and see the typical ratios that they use.

All black hat techniques – Including doorway pages, redirects, background colour text, background colour links, scrapped content or other copywrite violations.

Getting a ranking on Google is difficult but by adding content, links and on page optimisation, you will reach your objective. Remember that anyone that promises you fast results and a top ranking on Google is not to be trusted.

Mark McCormack is a twenty year B2B marketing veteran with extensive experience of web marketing. His business, Markmedia, offers consultancy advice and interim management placements for business with internet or offline marketing issues and opportunities. Their website is http://www.markmedia.org.uk and Mark can be contacted at mark@markmedia.org.uk.