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<<3-5 top tacitcs to improve your rankings/positioning in Google>>
Here's a strategy and tactics, for what it's worth. IMO, the most important thing is providing Google with what's it's looking for-- high quality information.
1. Site development, info architecture
- Develop a content-rich site that provides unique, quality information that others will want to provide to their customers.
- Organize pages into connected pods of related information if there's enough of it, in order to group related words, terms and concepts and to encourage inbound links to multiple pages on the site.
- Use bold text to highlight important terms - this is also good usability design; see "How Users Read on the Web", [useit.com...]
- include outbound links to the best of related sites/info resources that you know your customers would appreciate.
2. Promote it.
- Submit to ODP and Yahoo directories at least (I suspect media related sites might eventually benefit from NBCi listings). If pods are substantial and generally good enough, submit them separately (but not all at once). I think the topical categories (as opposed to regional) might provide a rank boost because of the greater density of related words. Shooting for the general topics will reach more customers in itself, but also lets content developers in the same business as yourself know about it.
- Announce new offerings to others who might be content developers and to other webmasters to link as a potential resource for their customers.
- Issue news releases, distribute URL in info sheets & other publications, cool stickers if going for a younger customer base, etc
- Check user logs for referrals from external sites & submit them to Google
- Periodically compare Google & Alta outside links & cross-submit (I'm not sure this actually helps but it might).
3. Maintain credibility
- don't do 2. before doing 1.
To improve your ranking on Google:
1) If your site is small, make it big. If it's big, make it bigger.
2) Organize your content to spread it out over many pages, giving each page its own specialized keyword content, and its own specialized title to catch a particular keyword phrase.
3) Make all your links descriptive.
4) (*Most Important*) Begin a relentless search for '.edu' links in to your site, to any of your pages. There are thousands and thousands of unused '.edu' links of the form 'university.edu/~student/gold.html'. Use those and more.
3- Start a new domain with the sole purpose of getting it listed in Dmoz, Yahoo, About, Looksmart. The new domains should be on a different host and in another country. Once your new domain has 1 directory listing start site #3
4- Interlink the domains.
5- Study your competition very carefully, I bet you are going to find that they are using more than one domain.
Target the multiple domain web structures in a closely related topic(theme). Suggest a link exchange between all your sites and their sites. You will find that the multiple domain web structures understand the use of linking and if they are not directly competing with you will exchange links.
When you start site #3 you should have already identified and exchanged links with 3 or 4 of these "web structures". Site #3 now starts off with about 20 quality inbound links.
Following this strategy is a little slow in the beginning but the results over a 6 to 8 month period of time will be successful. You will become your own competition, your direct competitors will now be asking you for a link exchange.
Just place "link" before the URL like this
link:http://www.
in the AV search box.
You may also find this useful:
[altavista.com...]
I forgot about the manual way to get that link info. I guess I was spoiled by Google.
Now I have lots of work to do. I have been given marching orders to improve our AV rankings.
We already rank #1 for many keywords on Google, thanks to WMW of course.
1. {+link:mydomain.example -host:mydomain.example}
2. {+link:competitor.example +RelevantKeyWord}
(1) removes the site itself from the listings. It's irritating having to wade through the internal links.
(2) is nice if you're looking for 'important' links that are also on the same theme. All we need now is a 1/n factor, where 'n' is the number of links on the page. Second thought...maybe that would be too easy. :-)
For my big keyphrase targets, the site ranks anywhere from #2 to #10, i.e first page.
For more unique phrases, site ranks number 1.
I now am solely concentrating on the most competitive keyphrases.
1. I am not using hidden text.
2. I am listing the keyword in mydomain-keyphrase.htm and title
3. Getting higher kw, and keyphrase occurance on the pages designated to the keyphrase.
4. Staying within the original theme, slowly creating ultra specific pages, so not to climb up google to fast and alert my competitors. Slow process, until rest of the engines list like google.
5. Loacation / frequency, is the substance of the process, as i have a couple of competitors sites, which are heavily optimized.
Hopefully this will get the number 1's for about 40 major keyphrases.
Anatomy of a Search Engine [www7.scu.edu.au]
1) Build a site, make it big. Link all your pages with a tiers system of linking eg: 20 links on index.html, linking to 20 pages in the root each with 20 links linking to 20 pages in 20 directories etc... Try not to go down more than 3 levels though.
2)Give the site theme. Make sure you have primary keyphrase at least once on every page. Use individual keyphrases at least once in every field of your page.
3)Use link text to build out bound link pop. Try to link to the most relevant sites in ODP, Yahoo, or Google itself. Get listed on ODP, Yahoo or get sites listed there already to link to you.
Submit at least 1 page from every directory you have.
Thats it (basically)
Just for reference, that is a historical document and has gotten pretty far from the way Google is run today.
I had read a lot about Google putting a lot of importance on Link Popularity, but that they penalize you if you just sign for a bunch of Free For All Links (FFA's). So I tried to think of ways i could get linked quickly to a bunch of other sites that had similar content to mine. I did this in 3 different ways. First, I did a search of google for my Keywords plus "add url". So if you were trying to get listed for selling Bobbing head dolls, I would search like this:
BOBBING HEAD DOLLS "ADD URL". What i would get is a bunch of sites that realted to Bobbing Head Dolls that I could add my site to. I only chose the ones that i could add immediately. If the site wanted a reciprocal link, i didn't do it. I then did the same search with my keyword and "add link" and again with my keywords and "Guestbook". I signed up for as many links as I could and also signed every Guestbook listed on Google for my Keywords. I only signed the Guestbooks that asked for my URL. I am now linked to the pages of some of my top competitors. As of yet, NONE OF THEM have figured it out. I don't think most website owners even read their guestbooks. Anyways, this all took me about 40 hours of work. When Google did their last update, I was #1 for several of my most important keywords.
I sign a lot of guestbooks as well and amazingly enough get traffic from them. Very easy way to build link pop.
You just saved me a lot of time searching for sites to link to. I just spent an hour with it and found 6 quality sites to submit to.
I used "add url" , "add link" , and "guestbook".
I also tried "directory" and "submit a site" and even combined the two and that worked great, too.
<link rel="home" href="/" title="RJO's Home" />
<link rel="search" href="/search.html" title="Search RJO's Site" />
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