Given that there are a heap of websites out there who are on the first page, what is their secret? It is a little industry term called “SEO” and it stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO basically consists of the customisation of your website, its content and its internal and external links to assist in the overall indexing and ranking of your website in popular search engines. There are many contributing factors that are used in determining a website’s ranking and every search engine is different. This makes trying to optimise your site for Google, Yahoo, Live and the many others quite a pain staking task.

As most of us are aware, Google is currently the most popular search engine for the majority of Internet users. As such, it is only normal that we’d want to focus our sights on achieving a higher ranking within Google first with a hope that the rest will follow. To do this, we must start a journey that could potentially take months before we start seeing any real change, however we have to start somewhere.

Our journey begins by defining some of the key contributing factors that Google uses to determine a website and webpage’s ranking within its results. These factors range from keyword use to manipulating internal and external links and the list goes on. To get you started, we have listed the top twenty factors that you should focus on in order to help get your website that little bit closer to the top of the search engine results listing.

Keyword Use Factors
The following components relate to the use of the user’s search query terms in determining the rank of a particular page.

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag – Placing the targeted search term or phrase in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header.
2. Keyword Use in Body Text – Using the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page.
3. Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords – Topical relevance of text on the page compared to targeted keywords.
4. Keyword Use in H1 Tag – Creating an H1 tag with the targeted search term/phrase
5. Keyword Use in Domain Name & Page URL – Including the targeted term/phrase in the registered domain name, i.e. keyword.com plus target terms in the webpage URL, i.e. seomoz.org/keyword-phrase.

Page Attributes
The following elements comprise how the Google interprets specific data about a webpage independent of keywords.

1. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure – Refers to the number and importance of internal links pointing to the target page.
2. Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages – Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
3. Age of Document – Older pages may be perceived as more authoritative while newer pages may be more temporally relevant.
4. Amount of Indexable Text Content - Refers to the literal quantity of visible HTML text on a page.
5. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically) – Assuming search engines can use text, visual or other analysis methods to determine the validity and value of content, this metric would provide some level of rating.

Site/Domain Attributes
The factors below contribute to Google’s rankings based on the site/domain on which a page resides.

1. Global Link Popularity of Site – The overall link weight/authority as measured by links from any and all sites across the web (both link quality and quantity).
2. Age of Site – Not the date of original registration of the domain, but rather the launch of indexable content seen by the search engines (note that this can change if a domain switches ownership).
3. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site – The subject-specific relationship between the sites/pages linking to the target page and the target keyword.
4. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
5. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site – The frequency and timing of external sites linking in to the given domain.

Inbound Link Attribute
These pieces affect Google’s weighting of links from external websites pointing to a page and ultimately will assist in the ranking of that page.

1. Anchor Text of Inbound Link.
2. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site.
3. Topical Relationship of Linking Page.
4. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community – The link weight/authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
5. Age of Link.

Negative Crawling/Ranking Attributes
There are also some points we should make before you start getting your hands dirty. With any type of SEO marketing, there are some things that can actually have a negative impact on your ranking. These following components may negatively affect a spider’s ability to crawl a page or its rankings at Google.

* Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
* Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
* External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
* Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
* Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

It’s now time to get busy! Start prioritising your tasks, modifying your content and building your internal and external links to meet some of the above guidelines. Keep in mind that improving indexing is mostly a technical task, improving ranking is mostly a business/marketing strategy, what might work now may not work in the future and finally, it takes time. Loads of time. Still, with a bit of trial and error and a good dose of persistence, you can achieve the search engine ranking you’re after.

Before you begin to develop your own strategy and implementation plan to optimize your website for improved page ranking, you have to reflect on what is the major objective of this initiative.

With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Here’s a 25 shortly tips and techniques:

1. Make sure your site is fully operational before you have it submitted – Do NOT submit a site that is under construction or having just one page.

2. Submit the domain or URL that have content in the correct format (http://www.mydomain.com – some directories accept it without http://)

3. Do NOT submit domains that redirect to another site

4. Create a good website for users, NOT for search engines. Do NOT present different content to search engines that you display to your users

5. Avoid the Hype, Rants, Whining, and Speculation

6. Selecting the most relevant category for your site. Don’t make the mistake of selecting the category too fast without checking if there would be a more relevant category. Take the time and choose the most appropriate category.

7. The links should ideally be optimized for the keywords that you want your site ranked for. Search engines utilize keywords or key phrases to identify web pages which are relevant to these terms. So, use the right keywords and keywords phrases.

8. Use relevant words in your title text and avoid words like “leader”, “greatest”, “best”, “cheapest” or any other exaggerated adjective.

9. You should have researched your keywords well and chosen those that are minimally competed for but adequately searched.

10. Don’t overstuff the anchor text – your title text for each page should be clearly defined with relevant keywords.

11. Don’t use generic terms to optimize your website. You will not improve your ranking at all. It is important that you select keywords which are not improve your ranking at all. It is important that you select keywords which are not overused and aptly describe (in a few words) what the site is about.

12. Select words or phrases that target a niche segment. Use the advanced tools available to create a list of relevant keywords which do not attract too much competition in your niche segment.

13. Check for broken links and correct HTML and avoid hidden text or hidden links.

14. Building links – which are effectively optimized – is essential to gain more traffic and obtain a high ranking on search engines.

15. To avoid your submission from being rejected, don’t make your title and description sound too promotional. Make sure that your TITLE AND ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.

16. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Search Engines crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

17. Do NOT mention in your description “and others” or “etc.” Or even “…”

18. Include the email address of your site domain NOT a free account like yahoo, hotmail or gmail.

19. Is essential to test your robots.txt file. Robots.txt file crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.

20. Use relevant keywords in your title text and anchor text can improve your search engine placement

21. Don’t repeat any keywords more than once

22. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Provide unique, relevant and fresh content to your users with a good grammar, correct spelling, and sentence structure.

23. Do NOT submit sites that install viruses, Trojans, or other badware.

24. Submit your site to relevant premier search engines and in the top directory such as the Open Directory Project, Yahoo, Google!

25. Make the best of directories by carefully submitting your links in the first place. Once your site has been accepted, it may be extremely difficult to change any of the mather submitted.

I hope that reading the above information was both enjoyable and educational for you. Stay up-to-date on SEO methods, techniques, skills, news – And Think Like a Winner!