The 6 Variables Of Google

When it comes to search engines, Google is KING. Any website designer, writer, or web marketer will tell you that. If you are going to have a high ranking website you are going to need to know what Google wants. You as a website owner have control over 5 basic elements while Google controls the sixth exclusively. Lets take a look at these variables for a brief moment.

1. Keywords – Keywords are very important. Keywords are the cornerstone of your search engine strategy. Keywords are what targets your visitors.  You strategically place keywords in your pages and in links on your pages as bait to attract visitors to your site.

2. Content – Just as Googleis the king of search engines, content is the king of your website. Content, from Googles perspective, actually means text. And you need a lot of text. Google, and the other search engines, will index words and you want them to index the keywords you’re interested in. The more words you have the more times your keyword can appear. Create pages that are optimized for specific keywords and key phrases that you know are used frequently.

3.Page Optimization – Having good keywords and good content is just the start. You have to strategically place your content on your pages to optimize the most from your keywords. If Google finds the keywords on your page, that’s good. If they find keywords in the right places that’s powerful and will set you apart from the rest of your competition.

4.Submissions – Although this is a good way to ask the search engines to look at your site and index it, the importance people have placed on submissions is grossly inflated. There are thousands of search engines on the internet and you probably will not get indexed on 1/3 of them. The so-called site submission sites that are out there are largely scams too.  The main three search engines you MUST submit to are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. A new idea to help search engines find you more easily was introduced by Google in 2005. XML sitemaps are placed in your root directory containing a list of links to all your site pages. I strongly suggest submitting your site to the Big 3 and provide them with your sitemap.

5.Links – Links pointing to your website are extremely important in the competitve keyword market. You flat out will have a difficult time getting high rankings without them. Just to illustrate how important links are, did you realize that links can get you listed at the top of page rankings without having a keyword that was searched for as long as the links had the keywords? Thats how powerful links are! (BTW – I’ll cover link strategy next week)

6.Time – The ONE thing you have absolutly no control over. Time. Some people talk about a Google sandbox. What happens is that your site does get indexed by them but they set you aside in a holding pattern until some time elapses.Once they feel you are credible you get to come out of the sandbox and play with the big boys.  Basically the longer your site has been up the better. As always though there are exceptions.

Hopefully this has helped you understand the search engines a little better. Remember that Google, Yahoo, and MSN can be your best business partners or they can simply ignore you based on the work YOU put into your website optimization.