SEO for Google

Continuing from our last two lessons - SEO for MSN and SEO for Yahoo, I am going talk about SEO for Google today.

Google, as probably all of you already know, I don't even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines It is estimated that Google is responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on.

So again, based on my experience, observation and research the major factors include:

• Backlinks


• Age


• Content


• How it fares in the results

Backlinks

More than on either Yahoo or MSN, backlinks are of special importance to Google. More importantly, Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. As I've noted before, if you do a search "link:www.yourdomain.com" on 3 different search engines, most likely, you will find that Google count the least backlinks. Probably you've already heard that Google only count your backlinks if the site that links to you has a PR higher than 4, but actually this is not true. The key factors that determine the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the ranking of your site are:

• The age of the links - The longer your links have been on a web page, the higher that value is. Basically this means that your link building efforts today aren't going to pay off right away.




• The location of the link - The physical location of your link on the page is an indicator to Google of it's value. The link that appears near the top of the site weights more than the link that appears near the bottom of the page.




• The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as "platform beds" then using these two keywords in the anchor text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these keywords. Be careful though, you shouldn't use the same anchor text over and over again since that would be considered spamming by search engines.




• Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of key importance. For example, a site with the title "Platform Bed Sale" links to me counts more than a site with the title "bedroom furniture". You should also know that relevancy is not only determined by the title of the site, some other factors such as content, meta tags also come into play.




• PageRank - No need for more explanation, a link from a PageRank of 6 is worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 1 page


Age
In a patent application from back in 2004 Google told SEO firms (and anyone else for that matter) that age was an important factor. Additionally, domains that are registered for longer periods of time are also seen as more legitimate and thus will tend to rank higher.

Content
Just like backlinks, Google is more picky than either Yahoo or MSN when it comes to content. The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they're looking for when they get there. Thus, Google tend to believe that If a page has more content, then searchers are more likely to find what they are looking for on that site. The content needs to be relevant and preferably well written.

Keyword density is not as large a factor on Google as on Yahoo or MSN. But you need to be careful because the proper density considered to be acceptable by Yahoo and MSN may be considered a spam by Google.

How it fares in the results
If your website appears in the results for a specific phrase but not many people are clicking on your site, then it will drop out of the rankings. What's more, if your website is clicked; after a few seconds, Google detects that the searcher has returned to the results to find a new site, then again your site will drop. That is why I've stressed before that it is important to insure that the titles you write for your website are both search engine and human friendly.