What Search Engines Want

Give Them What They Want and They'll Reward You with a Torrential Flood of Visitors

By Steve Canning

You are probably asking yourself the same thing most webmasters are wondering despite their best Search Engine Optimization efforts:

"Why is my site not coming up on page one of Google? Lots of folks are looking for my content there!"

You of course know that when you can answer this question you will have a deluge of targeted visitors to your site like never before.

Recent surveys have shown that typically about 85% of a web site's visitors come through search queries. You have good reason to look deeply into this matter.

You also know that if you are not in the first few listing in the SERPs your chances of getting any of this traffic are slim.

The SE's do a marvelous job of giving searchers exactly what they are looking for.

So when Google shows them their search query results they usually have the answers they've been seeking right there in the first two or three listings. So why would they search any further?

You need to get your site up on top of that first page where it will become the answer to your prospects query.

To get your site into these top positions you may have already gone out and paid good money for SEO software, link building services, or web marketing e-books.

Some are very good, many are absolute scams. Some are much worse than just throwing your money away: they could get your site banned! Ouch.

So many site owners have unwittingly promoted their websites into the 'dog house' without even knowing they were doing it until it was too late.

I know all about this - I have hundreds of sites and have bought just about everything out there and given it a try in the name of scientific SEO research. My motivation was the same as yours: find out what works and use it.

It's not the purpose of this article to expose the frauds so I won't get into that here. I prefer to focus on what DOES work, not what doesn't.

So here we go:

The Secret to getting to the top of the SERPs

The Secret to getting to the top of the SERPs is not unlike the secret behind solid marketing practices in any business:

Understand what they want, and give it to them.

Sounds logical, right? So what, exactly does Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc want? Read the next line carefully.

Google wants to deliver the most relevant results for the searchers query.

I'm going to say it again because it so vitally important:

GOOGLE WANTS TO DELIVER THE MOST RELEVANT RESULTS FOR THE SEARCHERS QUERY.

Think about it: How does Google make their money?

They get paid when someone clicks on the PPC advertisements in the vertical column on the right side of the page.

I know, you're thinking "what has that got to do with me, I'm looking for organic results, not paid advertising!" Right, bear with me and I'll explain:

Google can only make the vast sums of money they make on these ads is if they have scads of traffic to their site (sound familiar? Their objective isn't too different from yours, is it?).

They get this traffic by, you guessed it, understanding what their visitors want, and giving it to them.

People who search for stuff on search engines want the SE's to give them the most relevant results on the top. I know I certainly do.

So now we get to the real question:

How do the Search Engines determine this all important relevance?

This is most important. If you can answer this one, you will be able to give the SE's what they want and your online karmic rewards will be abundant beyond your wildest dreams.

Read on and I'll GIVE YOU THE ANSWER.

You'll find reams of information on the internet about how to optimize the content of your site to satisfy the engines.

This is all good (well most of what I've read about on-page factors has been correct anyway).

It really is important to put your keywords in the title tag, meta description, first paragraph, etc, etc. (I'll get into the specifics of this later.)

Note: The ideal keyword density of each of these on-page factors is different for every market niche. I use Axandra's IBP software to analyze the content of each of the top ten sites in a niche and one-up them with my own sites. It works extremely well. Download your free trial version of IPB here.

But this is just part of the overall equation. In fact, the importance of all these on-page factors is easily dwarfed by these same factors off-page!

What's on the pages of other sites linking to your site is more important than what is on your site.

I have seen sites with no indexable content (Flash only and image only sites) that rank #1 based solely on incoming links.

Here's how it works:

Google sends out robot spiders to record what they find on web pages everywhere.

They consider a link from one site to another to be a sort of recommendation or vote for the other site.

Now, in the human world, a recommendation from an expert certainly carries more weight than one from someone with no knowledge of the topic.

Makes sense, right? Well, its the same in the search engine world.

Let me give you an internet example (an over-simplified hypothesis for the purpose of illustrating a point):

Let's say you have two sites about Mountain Bikes:

• For the first site you get links from 100 other pages on the net that are about mountain bikes.
• For the second site you get the same number, 100 links, but from pages about dog food, auto mechanics, mortgages, and so on - everything BUT mountain bikes.

Same quantity of links (recommendations / votes) to each site. Different QUALITY.

Which one do you think Google will rank higher for the term "Mountain Bikes"? Yes, the first site by far of course.

Google and the other SE's have figured out that clever webmasters can stack the internet with inbound links from unrelated sites and trick them into ranking their sites highly.

Well, no more! At least some of your links had better be quality recommendations from pages relevant to your keywords or you will suffer the consequences (ranking penalties).

Note: It is essential in the early stages of your website's development to identify the right keywords for your site. To find out what terms people use to search for stuff on the net I use WordTracker. It gives an extremely thorough analysis of actual searches on specific subjects and the competition for each phrase. Without this info you are driving in the dark with your headlights off. Sign up for WordTracker here.

So how exactly does Google determine which pages are qualified to recommend your site in your keyword niche?

They look at all the factors you know are important to have in your on-page optimization - but they apply this thinking to the sites linking to yours.

Here is the information that the robots gather from the sites that link to you. They plug this in to their ranking calculations:

• Anchor text: After doing your keyword research on WordTracker to find the best keywords or key phrases for your site you must make sure these are in the link text pointing to your site. For example: <a href=http://www.yoursite.com>Mountain Bikes</a> This is the single most important factor in SEO. Do not make the mistake of brushing over this lightly. I cannot stress enough how important it is get the right keywords. WordTracker has a free research guide that explains some of this.
• Contextual Links: This is where your link is contained within a block of text (like those in the paragraph above). Any spammer can get links at the bottom of a page with a whole bunch of other links. But a link within the body of the content is considered truly relevant to the subject of the page. With contextual links even the text surrounding your link is viewed as relevant. Very powerful stuff.
• Page URL: This is the quickest and easiest way to tell what a page is about. The URL should contain your keywords and be one that the SE's consider to be static (unchanging / not dynamic). For example
  "somesite.com/cycling/mountain-bikes.htm"
  is WAY BETTER than "somesite.com/index.asp?category=cycling&subject=mountain%20bikes" (yuk!)
• Title Tag: The page containing your inbound link should have your keywords in the title tag. This is one of the most important factors in determining that this is a page about your subject matter:
  <title>My Favorite Mountain Bike Trails</title>
• Meta Description Tag: One of the most overlooked SEO factors. SE's look at this to verify topic authority. If your keywords are in the linking sites' description tag, you can bet the SE's will know this page is written specifically about your topic and consider them a worthy reference.
  <meta name="Description" content="Provides mountain bike riding tips and tricks and trail recommendations.">
• Meta Keywords Tag: This tag is not as important as it used to be but it is still considered by most robots at least to verify the subject of the page.
  <meta name="Keywords" content="mountain bike, single-track, riding trails">
  Note: These keywords had better also appear in your visible content or some SE's will consider them to be spam!
• H1 and H2 Tags: Good structuring of web pages helps both users and search engines to determine the logical progression of a page. The main topic of a page should be containted within <h1> tag and the secondary topic should be identified in the <h2> tag followed by properly formatted paragraphs.
  <h1>Mountian Bike Rider Thrashes Singletrack Parks</h1>
  <h2>Find the best and the worst mountain biking trails and facilities listed here</h2>
• Paragraph Text: This is the main content of the page that links to your site. It should include your keywords at least once.
• Relevant Inbound Links: The links pointing to the page that links to your site should also have your keywords or related keywords in the anchor text. These can be from other pages on the same site, or from external sites, or preferably both.

Pages linking to your site with these factors in place carry far more weight than those without.

One good link from a page like this could equal dozens of links from off-topic pages.

In fact, if you had nothing but unrelated pages linking to your site you are likely to be suffering some sort of penalty from Google as they may consider this to be spammy.

Summary:

Get links from other sites and directories that have pages related to your topic.

Use the list above to determine which pages you want your link to appear on.

Note: Axandra's IBP does a great job of identifying how well your competitors have done in this regard. IBP also comes bundled with another program called Arelis that goes out and finds ideal sites to request links from and even semi-automates the request process. I use IBP all the time, but I really haven't experimented much with the Arelis side because I have been very happy with SEO Elite which does just a wonderful job of this. (If you have used Arelis I would like to hear from you - let me know what you think of it)

Don't waste your precious time trying to get links from sites that are not designed to provide link relevance when you could get a much bigger return for your efforts by focusing on QUALITY links.

I promise you, your time and money are far better spent getting positive results from highly relevant links.

Give the search engines what they want and you will dominate the SERPs and enjoy an abundance of laser targeted visitors to your site.

Happy SEOing!

Steve

Resources:

Axandra SEO Software: In my opinion still has some fine tuning to do to become a ten out of ten SEO tool. But I would rate this one an awesome 9.3 on the scale. A full suite of page analysis tools, backlink analysis, search engine and directory submission software, and so much more. This one serves me very well indeed. I highly recommend this one for single site owners and SEO professionals alike.

SEO Elite: Some crossover in functionality with the Axandra product, and some completely unique features. It doesn't have the comprehensive page analysis features that are so great in Axandra. A good foundation and application of true SEO issues drives this one high into my ratings scale with an 8.7 out of 10. Very useful and well worth the price.

Keyword Elite: Keyword research tool ideally suited for Google AdSense / AdWords campaigns. I haven't used this one myself yet so I can't give you an opinion from first-hand experience. However, it's from the same guy (Brad Callen) who created SEO Elite and I have learned to value his advice and products. Brad consistently over-delivers. I'll be trying this one out myself very soon.

Overture Keyword Selector tool is free to use and handy for quick keyword lookups. But it doesn't provide the kind of comprehensive research that is an absolute must for webmasters who are serious about getting to the top of the SERPs. Beware, this one is very popular and often gets overwhelmed with traffic, so you may need to be patient with it.

WordTracker: Can be a bit clunky to use sometimes and I wish it would provide a user manual or some guidance. But holy cow, once you get the hang of what it can do it's absolutely amazing. Very highly recommended. No, scratch that - ESSENTIAL! I won't launch a page without it.