Your best chance of gaining top honors in google’s site ranking is creating a high quality web site. In their most recent Google Search release, called the panda algorithm, Google provided guiding questions that helped them shape how their search engine should work. It’s only logical that these questions also work as a guide to how to built the web site that ranks well in the first place. Here are those questions:

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

Now you know what Google thinks a quality site is. Most of the questions have to do with the copy, and not the pictures. Though search engines are not completely blind to pictures, they do not evaluate your fabulous pictures and designs. Take that into account and judiciously use the alt attribute to translate pictures into words.

Submit Your Site To Google, Yahoo and Bing

• Google with 66.4% of market share in 8/12, or 11.3 billion searches.
• Bing with 15.9% market share as of 9/12, or 2.7 billion searches.
• Yahoo with 12.8% of market share as of 9/12, or 2.2 billion searches.

Current Web Analytics (world)

How Search Engines Work

The search bots crawl links, essentially discovering the link structure of the web that binds all pages. The search engine then analyses the code and stores selected pieces of the pages in massive hard drives, to be recalled when you make a search.

The search engine does two things for the user: it returns only those results that are relevant or useful and ranks those results in order of importance, usually according to popularity.

Search Engine Optimization

The best advice that Google gives is to build the web page in a standards complient and semantically correct way. Search Engine optimization, or SEO means to build web pages so they are optimally structured for search engines.

Indexable content: Search Robots only read text. All non-text should have detailed descriptions, as in alt attribute for pictures, descriptions for Flash and Java plug-ins and video files should have transcripts between the audio and video tags if you want people to search for the content. Search engines also need to access the crawlable link structure to find all of the pages on a website.

Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of SEO and all search is based on keywords. As the engines crawl and index the contents of pages around the web, they keep track of those pages in keyword-based indices. Search engines have millions and millions of small databases, each centered on a particular keyword term or phrase. This makes it possible for the engines to retrieve the data they need in a mere fraction of a second.

Though keyword usage and targeting are only part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, effective keyword usage will go far to make pages SEO “optimized.”

1. The keyword, ideally, it should be in the URL.
2. Use the keyword in the title, twice if possible, and at the beginning is better. Keywords in the title is the most important place to achieve high rankings.
3. Use the keywords in the h1 header tag.
4. Use the keywords least three times in the body copy of the page.
5. Use bold or strong to place emphasis on the keywords (the bots like that).
6. Use the keyword in the alt tag of pictures (good for image searches).
7. Use it at least twice in the meta tags.

Meta tags

Meta tags provide information about a website’s content. You can use the following meta tags: index/noIndex, follow/noFollow and noArchive if you want to talk to the bots directly. The meta description tag draws readers to your site from the results and is an important part of search marketing. This is what gets posted in the description.

The meta keywords tag had value at one time, but is no longer valuable or important to search engine optimization.

URL Structures:

Your universal resource locator, or web address, is of great importance from a search perspective.

No Follow

If you do not want a bot to follow a link, you can include the attribute: rel=”nofollow” after the href, <a href="#" rel="nofollow">link</a>.

Banning Bots All Together

If you do not want to be in the search engines, you can place the robots.txt file with the content: User-agent: * Disallow: /in your directory. The * means all user agents, and applies to all bots that search engines use to comb the net. All major search engines respect this convention.

The Landing Page Optimization Guide You Wish You’ve Always Had

Follow the link to an extensive list of resources that can be applied specifically to landing page optimization.

Step Zero – Really Understand Your Target Market

Step 1 – Set Up Actionable Analytics

Step 2 – Make Sure Your Ad’s Message Matches The Landing Page

Step 3 – Evaluate Your Landing Page’s First Impression

Step 4 – Does Your Page Have Emotional Resonance?

Step 5 – Craft A Clear & Compelling Value Proposition

Step 6 – How Will Images Reinforce The Message?

Step 7 – Should We Create an Explainer Video?

Step 8 – The Importance of Social Proof, Authority & Testimonials

Step 9 – Does The Copywriting Make You Want To Read More?

Step 10 – Does Your Call To Action Communicate Clearly?

Step 11 – Start A/B Testing

So much of a visitor’s landing page experience happens in less than a second & most of focus on the entirely wrong side of that experience.

If you think of your landing page as a way to tell the story of how your prospect’s life gets better, and use what you know about how the brain processes text and images, you can create a “hook” that gets them wanting more.

In that case, Landing page optimization is just a way to make the story better every time it’s told.

SEO resources

Much of this information has come from SEOMOZ, Google’s SEO Starter guide (pdf), Google’s webmaster tools and help and Search Engine Land web site. Visit these to learn perfecting keyword targeting on-page optimization..

Another great resource is the SEO plugin for WordPress Yoast and the site itself has lots of information as well. With all of these resources, there is no reason that your site is not SEO friendly.

Google’s Publisher’s Plugin for WordPress

Visit the Google search algorithm changes chart for 2013 to give you an idea of how a search engine remains a moving target.