Top 5 SEO Tips for Google

What's most important right now? Has it changed?

[morty]

I have been tweaking multiple sites using different approaches and have learned little about the most important SERP determinants. It seems too random anymore. My once successful approach seems to be fading quick.

Any thoughts on the TOP 5 for here and now?

[Swash]

I would guess that one of them is :

Have as many inbound links with relevent anchor text as possible

[mars9820]

not only anchor text on incoming links. But also anchor text on internal links.

It seems Google also keeps track of that.

Therefore links to your product pages should have appropriate and well choosen anchor textlinks.

Well I guess this is the easy part since you are the webmaster yourself and can always decide on your own anchor text instead of asking external links from other webmasters that might or might not follow your anchor textlink request.

My experience is that they always list my link by company name instead of keywords :(...poor me...

[rfgdxm1]

>Have as many inbound links with relevent anchor text as possible

I'd add to that making sure that the inbound links are adequate to raise your home page PR to at least 6. PR6 is a level that is fairly easy, and almost downright trivial to achieve. Beyond that is much more difficult. However, higher than PR6 in almost all cases really isn't the important thing to worry about.

[martinibuster]

rfgdxm1 is right. The PR isn't as important. It's only one part of many things. Here's my vote for the top 5 SEO tips (only my opinion, though, so feel free to disagree):

• Inbound links [webmasterworld.com] (reciprocal and one-way)
  
• Lots of content [webmasterworld.com]
  
• HTML with minimum code clutter [webmasterworld.com]
  
• Deep links
  
• Site architecture that pushes as much content to the top as possible, and ensures good spider coverage within each individual area

It think a sister thread to this could be:

What are the Top 5 SEO tips for what not to do.

[GreatVista]

similar to martinibuster's

inbound and outbound links

online time

domain and file name

deep link

content

[dvduval]

Yes, online time seems to be playing a bigger role than previously.

I say:
1. Incoming links - more and more I'm seeing people successfully trading links with sites of unrelated content and receiving a high pagerank, but I'm still not getting on that wagon.
2. Page Titles
3. Nav structure designed to spread PageRank
4. Content...the more (pages) the better
5. Site continuously updated

You can really do too much about uptime, but I have some sites that would certainly be #1 if it weren't for this problem.

[webjp]

What I have been noticing recently is a sharp rise in number of sites having more content and the ones which have been in the game for a long time, so
1) Content
its more important than anything else on the list for me,
2) Backlinks
links from different sites of the same theme preferably,
3) Title and Url
These are as usual playing a major role in the listings,
4) Page Rank
I have to say its importance has decreased in a major way because I have seen sites with awsome PR (got by heavy number of links from an edu site ofcourse) are in 40's. (speculating)
5) Stay away from spammy sites
keep your hands clean and you will be rewarded.

cheers ;)

JP

[tgone]

dvduval

When you sau "online time seems to be playing a bigger role than previously" what do you mean?

Is this the amount of time visitors spend at the website?

[mykel79]

>tgone
"Online time" would be the time the site has been online. THere is a lot of evidence to show that lately new sites don't get high rankings. Do a search on the forum for "sandboxed sites".

[tgone]

mykel79

Thanks for that but when I do a sitesearch for "sandboxed sites" nothing is found

[cyberfyber]

I don't know how commonplace this is, but it seems to have worked for me...

In regards to anchor text and getting incoming link'ers to use appropriate descript's. Perhaps coming up with a catchy phrase which describes your site's theme would encourage folks to include such catch-phrase in their links to you.

My own catch-phrase for my biggest site is on the homepage's title and repeated within the content as well. It's unique in its wording and a search for this phrase on Y! & G will bring me up as #1 with all incoming link'ers below (of which there are plenty). Thus, it's worked for me.

I'm not sure, is what I mentioned old old news?

if, so,....sorry.

[PhraSEOlogy]

I recently re-vamped a site and made sure ALL the internal links were valid. The site went from PR4 to PR6. I think that the good internal structure had a hand in the PR but I cannot confirm this with hard evidence.

Just my 2 cents worth.

[nileshkurhade]

Inbound back links is I thing the most important factor for Google. There was a very famous free web hosting company that was acquired by other company. The web hosting company had lots of inbound links with web hosting as anchor text. After this web hosting company was taken over, the domain name was available. A new finance / money / banking related company bought the domain name. Remember the inbound links are still there with the anchor text web hosting. And the new company comes up in top 10 for these keywords.

So inward links with proper anchor text is No. 1 factor in Google for me.

[seogreenie]

So, what's up with this "online time"? We just noticed an old site of ours that we'd forgotten about and hadn't updated in about 6 years, and it's #1 everywhere! Funny thing is, it's got over 600 broken links! Of course, we've decided to revamp, but it's strange...

[SlowMove]

I'm starting to think that Google uses some sort of fuzzy logic when looking at clusters of linked pages on a site. If the pages that it examines are too similar, other pages of the group may not get spidered or indexed. Keep everything on topic, but if you have to say the same thing on several pages, rewrite it every time.

[mykel79]

tgone:
Sorry, I didn't realize that all the threads about this are in the Supporters forum :(

[MHes]

seogreenie - "we've decided to revamp"

I don't envy you, what do you change? Or perhaps you should leave well alone and revamp via images!

[seogreenie]

We're going to fix those links 1st!

After that, I don't know. It's one of the 1st sites I created, html by hand, guess I'm nostalgic about it... I think we'll keep the updating minimal and see what happens. What would you suggest? It's our first networking computer site. Then we heard how important URL names were and abandoned it for a better URL. hah!