Getting Natural Rankings and SEO

There are any number of ways to get natural rankings on Google, and not one single method or strategy will work.  Google’s ultimate goal is to develop a search engine that can think like a human brain.  Balancing the if’s and but’s against algorithm’s that engineers have developed that can “think” through mathematical calculations that take place in micro-seconds.  And Google has thousands of engineers working on this every day, which is another reason the Google algorithm changes almost daily.    Meta keywords mean little to Google anymore, however Yahoo and Bing do continue to lend a bit of credit to them for ranking.  Content and Links are still king, thus that is where we are focused for this writing.

BACKLINKS

Backlinks have become more important over time as one if not the most important factor for increasing natural rankings with Google.  A backlink is like an “endorsement” from a webpage in search engine results saying that the page has more authority than the other endorsed pages, and the more authority or knowledge it brings to the reader, the higher Google will rank it in natural rankings.

Some engines refer to this ranking or reward as The Transfer of Authority.  This rewards a website for having well placed relevant links that are coming from prominent, high-authority web-pages from within a particular website.  For example, an article with a link coming from a credible website such as www.cnn.com or www.foxnews.com about a new technich used to get the rust off of chrome that links to a site that specializes in metals will give the site major credibility over a site that has 20 links that are not relevant to the site content.  The same pretty much holds true for trading links.  A search engine has the ability to scope a link coming from a particular site, and read a return link which in essence rules out the two links as having any value.   You are much better off to have multiple internal links within a site that link back to similar subjects to maintain the reader’s interest, thus time on a site, than having a series of nebulous links.

INTERNAL LINKS

Since you have the opportunity to build on these internal links fairly easily, these links can have important relevance to the site ranking itself.  In the case of Web 2.0 site links that allow you to have mini-sites within your larger website, all of these links in the mini-sites will in fact appear to the search engine to be relevant internal links.

One way to build popular links is from building a lens at www.squidoo.com that links back to your site.  Any other lenses from Squidoo that link to your lens and ultimately to your main site, can show up as internal links with authority.   There are tools we use that allow you to analyze internal backlinks that allow you to compete against other web-pages that have backlinks as well.   Our basic strategy is to check for competitive sites that have fewer internal backlinks that we can beat.  By analyzing their backlinks, and keywords, we can build a strategy to overcome them in the ranking game.  We can also look at the actual backlinks of competitive sites and send or sign up for links on those sites gaining momentum as well.

INDEX COUNT

The next subject we will cover is index count which shows the number of pages from a web site that are picked up by the search engine.  This is another critical factor in measuring the performance of a site.  The number of relevant pages that a site has the more credibility that a site has to the search engines.

Index count measures the number of pages on a website that are seen by Google.  This is probably the second most important feature in measuring the performance of any website.  This tells you how much attention that Google pays to your web site, and generally the higher the index figure, the more valuable Google perceives the web site to be.  If you have a large website with 100+ pages and you notice the index count is dropping, then usually your search engine rankings will be dropping as well.

Below is an example of the type of report you can expect from us along with the critical content you’ll come to expect.