The Little Geeni

Current Positions At the time of writing my site ranks
for the term ‘website hacking’ (no quotes needed): MSN: 1st and 2nd Google: 3rd

Introduction The web started out as one big irrelevant
mass of pages, you would have to guess URLs or remember all of
them! Then along came the first search engines, these relied on
manual submissions from webmasters and so developed slowly, then
along came search engine spiders. As soon as these search
engines were “crawling” or “spidering” thousands of pages,
people immediately saw this as an opportunity to help people
boost their search engine rankings. Unfortunately, as I shall
show you throughout the article, not everybody goes about this
business in the right way.

Relevancy The key to a good search engine ranking is
relevancy, is your website relevant to the search terms you are
targeting? Many times clients have wanted to be listed for terms
which have nothing to do with their website. One notable example
was a client who wanted to be #1 ranked for the phrase: “online
clothing” when he was in fact selling deodorants and
antiperspirants. Even if he made his ranking the visitors would
not be interested in his product!

Competition & Keyword Choice The second thing to look out
for is competition, the “keyword modifier” or second keyword can
make all the difference, rather than “games”, try “board games”,
rather than “parties”, try “birthday parties”. Not only will you
get more relevant visitors but you will also find it easier to
get top listings as the competition is not so great.

Link Exchanges Do not go about this the wrong away. As
you can read in a recent article by Mike Banks Valentine
(http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2004/nov/25.html) you can ruin
your chances if you employ bad tactics or do not research your
“friends” thoroughly. I rarely accept people into a link
exchange – they must have a PR or 4 or higher, they must not
employ bad SEO tactics and they must have good original content,
because otherwise my sites could be penalised for the bad work
of others. I also cross-check their name across black-lists to
see if they have already been caught doing something wrong.

Doorway Pages Never ever use doorway pages. I recently
saw a piece of doorway page generation software which was free
and which claimed to be compliant to search engine guidelines.
As the very notion of doorway pages is despised by all search
engines this is impossible. Do not use them as they can only do
harm.

However, as many are sceptical of whether or not this is true, I
ran a recent experiment: I optimized my site for the search
engines using the strategies above and at the same time as
launching this site I launched an identical one on a URL I
cannot publish. I used 1000 doorway pages generated
automatically and pointed them to the main page from the same
domain. With the first domain Google sends me hundreds of
visitors a day, while the second example with the doorway pages
is nowhere in the results, probably banned, for employing “black
hat” SEO techniques.

Conclusion The moral of the day is simple, do not try and
work around the search engines, work with them. Concentrate on
relevancy, keyword choice and link exchanges, as these are the
only ways you can legitimately get a top search engine ranking.
Remember, content is King and relevance is Queen, there is no
point having good content and irrelevant keywords and
vice-versa, only aim for what can be achieved, watch your
competition and be an honest SEO.

editor Google Google