No one but Google’s engineers knows the inner workings of Google’s PageRank algorithm, but those who work in the search marketing business and have studied the patterns that are seen can make some very educated guesses.

There are so many factors involved in how Google determines a website’s value, but there are some that rise to the top in order of importance. Here are the top three to focus on:

1. Relevant Content

You should have a list of keywords that are important for your business. These keywords are what you want to get ranked for in Google. When someone searches for one of your keywords, the goal is to have your site be among the top listings for that term.

Each page on your site should be tightly focused on one or two keywords. These should be sprinkled throughout the page, from the page title and section headline to written content, image titles and tags. In the written copy, use these keywords wherever it makes logical sense to include them without forsaking readability. 

One of the factors that Google looks for is the context that is surrounding a keyword. If the written copy is highly relevant and related to the keyword, is of sufficient length, and backed up with usages of the keyword in all of the other important places, then Google considers that a more highly ranking page. Increase this contextual relevancy by including other material on the page, such as links to related articles, blog posts, or news items.

When someone searches for a particular keyword phrase, they are looking for information that most closely matches what they are searching for. This is also what Google is looking for. So, essentially, making your content as richly informative as possible will serve a dual purpose.

2. Links

The web is built on links. Indeed, it couldn’t be a called a “web” without the interlinked sites that make up the structure of the World Wide Web. Besides the on-the-page factors that the spiders look for in determining a page’s quality, the link profile is among the most important.

Spiders look for links to and from your site to determine where your site will rank in the search engine for your keywords and phrases. This evaluation weighs the other sites that are associated with yours, their relevance to your content, and what the reputation of those sites is and in turn the sites that they link to.

Because links are so important, huge industries have been built up around buying and selling links to and from highly ranked pages, despite the fact that Google strictly forbids it (with the exceptions of links in advertisements) and devalues those links.

Effective link building involves finding websites that are related and relevant to your own and receiving a link from them to you. This takes place naturally on the web when one page has good content that other sites want to link to and share. The more links you have the more people will find you, and the more links you will get.

There’s no consensus on how many links you need. To search engines, your link profile is like a popularity contest—they’re evaluating the strength and relevance of the pages that are linking to you but that’s not all they look at. They are also looking at the "anchor text," which is the clickable text and what it says about the page that it links to. It’s better to have the clickable text be a keyword or phrase rather than simply “click here,” for example. Then on the page the link points to, also use that same keyword or phrase. 

Paid link schemes promise to drastically increase the number of links to your site, which they often do, but these links are usually of low quality and may not be permanent links. So the programs may help at first but then will leave your site in no better shape than it was before when the links start to disappear. Search engines are onto this tactic, as well, so they look for signs that a site’s link profile has been artificially inflated. A natural approach is best—allow your links to grow slowly over time, no more than 10% per month. And while it’s fine to have some links to low pagerank pages, focus on the greatest degree of relevancy that you can. Link building is never done. It’s an ongoing process and is one of the most effective things that you can do to increase the visibility of your site on search engines.

3. Technical Aspects of Site Design

There are some great-looking websites out there that aren’t in Google’s results pages at all, and it sometimes surprises the site owners why that is. Website designers have a lot of tools at their disposal for designing great looking sites, but not all of those techniques are search engine friendly. Sometimes site owners want a certain feature because they like how it looks, but don’t understand that the design of their site has a great impact on their rankings.

Search engine spiders are pretty smart, but all they know how to “read” are words. There are certain formats such as Flash and Javascript that produce great visuals but can't be read by the search engines. Depending on how the site is set up there could be entire sections within those menus (like a photo gallery) that can’t be navigated by the spiders, so the pages won’t be indexed and that content is essentially lost to search traffic. There are work-arounds, but not every designer is skilled enough to know what they are.

There’s a search query that you can use on Google to see the pages on your site that are being indexed. Go to the Google search bar and type in site:www.yourdomain.com and the results will show you the page title and description that Google is pulling for the page. If the page titles and descriptions are all the same, short, keyword stuffed, or missing, they’re not going to be effective.

A tool known as a search engine spider simulator can show you what a spider “sees” when it crawls your site. Here’s one: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php (Limelight Department is developing its own and we'll post it here when it's completed. 3/22/09)

If you try this and see that there is very little text or that some of your links are not being followed, for instance, these are some big problems with your site that you can address.

Summary

Visitors want the same thing that search engines want: 1) relevant, useful content, 2) easy to navigate design, and 3.) links to and from other high quality related sites. The most natural and organic SEO comes not necessarily from trying to serve the search engines, but by providing the highest quality content to your site visitors that you can. If you do that well, the search engines will value your site too, and your rankings will climb the ladder to the top.

Limelight Department is a full service advertising agency that specializes in internet marketing for businesses across the US and Canada. Our experts utilize proven strategies of website development, media design, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, copy writing, content distribution and many other services to send targeted, ready-to-buy traffic to your site. Visit LimelightDepartment.com for more information.