I thought I had posted this Q already, but can find nothing … so here goes again:
What are the practical aspects of weighting Google search responses so that a certain web site/page comes out higher on the list of results?
I have a client who runs a small (personnel-wise), but successful marketing consulting firm. He advises some big names, like FedEx, Verizon, Citibank, etc. But do a search for “marketing”, and you, naturally, will never find him in the first 20 pages.
Now, I understand that Google ranks results by how many other people link to a particular site, etc. And that it’s possible to “game” the system so that outcomes are different than one might expect (i.e., Savage Love’s successful campaign to get the sexual slang definition of “Santorum” ranked higher than Sen. Rick Santorum’s own web site).
My client might be able to ask a favor of someone like a FedEx–a heavyweight with some reasonable traffic and links of their own–and have them post a link or two to his web site on their own site.
Now, what’s the best way to go about doing this? Should he have them link just to his home page? Would his results be better if he had them link to multiple pages on his site? Should he just go after the biggest fish in his client roster, or ask a bunch of smaller clients to link to him?
Just what is known about the secret Google ranking algorithms?
You’re kidding. Firstly it’s like a national secret, second, people pay $ooo’s for genuine insights and third, there is masses and masses or free info online – some good, some not so good. Seach on ‘Search Engine optimization + Google’, or if you’re British forget the ‘z’ and use a ‘s’ – see, need to think laterally, as well (optimise for ‘z’ and ‘s)’ or you miss a chunk of your market.
Anyway, the goalposts are always moving. For now the key is to have the site that’s linking to you include the keyword you’re targeting in the text of the link – and have them link to the page (maybe the home page) that has optimisted for that keyword:
Don’t forget it’s all about keywords and phrases; people do a whole lot better by not even trying to compete on single popular words and think how else people would search for that thing.
This will keep you/them busy for a month or two:
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm
The folks at Google are constantly tweaking their algorithms to ensure that ranking bears some relationship to relevance. Attempts to manipulate one’s position can backfire, and may result in a site being banned from Google entirely.
The best way to get a good ranking and to keep it is to have plenty of good descriptive text on your page. Google wants to serve the needs of the searcher. Packing a bunch of irrelevant keywords onto your site may temporarily fool the Googlebot, but in the long run it is an abundance of useful text that will serve you well.