Ways of Getting Into Google And Staying There - The Ultimate Quick Guide to Google SEO

Create Unique Compelling Content

Google loves unique content. But more importantly so do humans, and the best advice is to create your content for human visitors first and foremost.

Great content attracts attention and people show their interest by linking to your content. Every time someone links to you Google counts this as a vote for your content - the more votes the higher your SERP ranking. Oh, and just for the record, the converse of this also holds - Google hates copied content just as much as it loves unique content so don’t expect much love if you scrap other sites.

Better Links = Higher SERPs

The most important trick to getting those all important #1 positions from Google is to get great links pointing at your unique content. (Having a 10 year old domain doesn’t hurt also, but that’s another story.)

This is probably the trickiest part of getting Google’s love - if people cant find you how can they possibly link to you? Well my advice is to go for the low-hanging fruit first. Human edited web directories offer a great way to get some easy links.

If you have a bit more time you could also try some writing some quality articles related to your niche and submit these to the top article directories.

A quick note about link anchors:

If I can control just one single factor when looking for Google love then it would have to be the anchor text used in the backlinks pointing at my content.

IMO Google applies quite a serious bias to the anchor text used in your backlinks when determining the most appropriate SERP position (and if you want to see what the difference is between #1 and #2 or #1 and #10 then take a look at this).

Some link tools and other info

Most Search Engines allow the use of the link: operator to display the backlinks a website has. Generally I use Yahoo.com to check backlinks quickly, but be warned that the Google link: command NEVER displays anything other than a sample of your backlinks.

MSN have just recently released the LinkFromDomain: operator which shows you all the outbound links from a website (handy to check where a site is linking to).

Tell Google Where You Are

Google offers country-specific searches on all its search properties. If you want to appear in any particular ‘pages from [your country here]’ search you must fulfil one of the following conditions:

1. your site must be physically hosted in the targeted country (and the server IP must resolve to that country); and/or
2. your domain must use the ccTLD of the targeted country.

So if you want to target the ‘pages from Ireland’ search your website must be either hosted on a server located in Ireland (use this to test) or your domain must be a .ie ccTLD.

Remember the ‘Long-Tail’

Google indexes pages not websites so each page can target different keywords that apply to the niche you are targeting. The more possible ways people have of finding your site then the more potential visitors your site will receive from Google.

You should make use of keyword estimators (although bear in mind that none is flawless) to ensure that your pages and copy contain the keywords people actually search for. There are many free keyword tools that you can try.

You should also familiarise yourself with the advanced operators available from most of the major search engines. ‘inanchor:’, ‘allinanchor:’, ‘intitle:’ and ‘allintitle:’ are extremely useful for determining how competitive particular search phrases are, and these operators should form part of any serious keyword analysis.

It’s worth mentioning that the rapid growth of local search (e.g. appending place names onto queries) means that targeting particular locations is becoming more important. I personally see far more referrals come for localised search queries than from country-only filtered searches. (Note - I work on optimising Irish websites so this observation should be taken in that particular context.)

Learn just 1 important Apache module

If you want to really be best friends with Google then I suggest you learn 1 fairly easy Apache module:

mod_rewrite allows you to turn those ugly dynamic URLs into their pretty SEO-friendly static-looking counterparts.

mod_rewrite also allows you to redirect the non-www to your www website URL (or vice-verse). This issue, known as the canonical URL, is one of the most common causes of problems within Google’s index.

I also suggest getting familiar HTTP header codes, and in particular the 301 redirect which might someday save your relationship with Google.

Play by the book

If you try to game Google chances are you’re going to fail. Unless you are extremely well versed and experienced in
black-hat techniques any attempt to ‘con’ Google is likely to have very serious consequences for your site.

I recommend you become familiar with the Google webmaster guidelines, and very carefully research any grey areas before you implement any semi-shady changes to your property. Wrong-doings usual result in either a penalty or an outright ban depending on the severity of the misdeed.