There is no secret to high search engine rankings

While the intricacies of search engine algorithms are known only to the engineers at Google, Yahoo Search, Ask, MSN Search and the like, the fundamentals of getting top rankings remain the same. Achieving high rankings on search engine results pages are most influenced by two phenomena: content and links.

Fortunately, Web site owners and marketers have a lot of control over both of these!

Content

Search engines thrive on content. The greater the number of words, pages and overall text goodies on your web site, the more a search engine has to add to their listings. For example, if you have 10 words on your home page, a search engine can only catalogue those ten words as the content of your home page. If you have 250 words on your home page, all of those words are indexed and associated to your home page. That’s a big difference!

The best content for your web site is original, on topic and fresh.

Original. Original content is material that has not been published anywhere else on the web. All the information written by you or your marketing team specifically about your company, your services, your success stories is your original content. An articles section, or a news section, can be part of your original content repertoire as well.

Content pulled from other sites such as news headlines or a feed from a relevant blog can be a benefit to your web site, but is not the same as original content written by your organization.

On topic. On topic content means that your web site has a specific focus. It’s best to keep a consistent presentation on the main types of information your web site has. A good system for making sure your site stays on topic is to identify your main topics of expertise.

For example, if you own an interior design firm, a list of your web site’s primary topics might include: interior design, sustainability in interior design, information on your firm, trends in interior design, and alternative building materials. Having a list of your favorite restaurants would be off topic — unless your firm designed the interiors!

Fresh. Fresh content is an essential part of maintaining high search engine rankings for a few reasons. Google awards a freshness boost to a page when it crawls it for the first time. The more often you have fresh pages, the more chances your site has to appear higher in the search results. Plus, the more frequently you update your web site, the more often search engines will visit come back to your site to check for new contents.

Links

Links are why we call it “the web” and they are a key ingredient on how well your web site ranks. All types of link factors influence your web site’s ranking, including inbound links and outbound links.

Inbound. Inbound links are those links to your web site from another web site. This is the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Google won’t even list your web site in their index if no other web site links to it. The number of links and quality of the web sites where the links come from are both important. Having a link from a premier web site about interior design will be more influential in your rankings than having a link from your neighbor’s personal web site about growing organic tomatoes.

Outbound. Linking from your web site to other web sites that have on related topics is a great way to enhance your keywords and contents. Do be careful, linking to web sites that are considered “spam” or in a “bad neighborhood” will hurt your search engine rankings. Use your judgement in determining if a web site is spam by taking a look at it. You’ll know if it’s one to avoid if it has 100’s of links, excessive pop-up ads, questionable contents, or appears only as a means for getting advertising money.

A note about reciprocal links: Reciprocal links or link trades became a very common way to build up links to your site. The idea was that you would find a site with content related to yours and ask them to trade links with you. It was easy to encourage someone to do it, because it boosted both web sites’ inbound links so that both of their rankings might improve. Recently, Google (and other search engines) changed the amount of credit awarded for inbound links that were reciprocated by a link back to the same site.

The bonus!

The great thing about having quality content and links for your web site, is that both of these are also highly attractive to your visitors. Offering useful links so your visitors can learn more about your industry is much better than a page of haphazard links to poor quality web sites. The more inbound links you have, the more likely someone will click directly on them to go to your site — without even using a search engine. And unique, frequently updated content is a reason for your visitors to keep coming back to your site.