How Do I Get My Website to the Top of Google?

FAQ

How Do I Get my Site to the Top of Google?

Google is the primary search engine on the internet. They have about 80% of the search market space. So Google matters more than all other search engines. And being at, or near, the top of Google is the best place to be. But how is that done?

We wont divulge all our secrets here as knowing all those tricks is our business, but we'll give you some insight.

Google, and all the other search engines, attempt to rank sites by their relevancy to search terms that users enter into a search. To do so it must have an index of pages to choose from. Google sends out little robots, also called bots or spiders, to crawl the web. They hop from link to link and when they discover a new page the add it to its index.

They store copies of all the text on a page. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase it then sorts through its index to grab all the pages that have those words on them. This often produces millions of results. Next it must determine an order to sort them in. This is where it gets very complicated.

The region of the page where the words occur and how often they occur on the page influence relevance. A page that mentions the word only once is far less relevant than one that mentions it multiple times. But only up to a point. Over use of keywords in text can be the mark of a spammer and Google is on the lookout for that and will penalize pages that over do it.

Google also looks for clues to a pages relevance from other pages that are linking to it. Links from pages that have related content and keywords will pass more relevance through their links than pages with unrelated content. Also pages that have more links to them are more relevant as a link is like a vote, but not all links carry equal weight. Also the text inside a text link can pass relevance if it is using your keywords or variations of your keywords in the link text.

Other things that Google takes into consideration is the age of your domain. It trusts older sites more than newer sites. The country your website is hosted, where the server is located, in relation to the country a searcher is located. It uses IP addresses to track this. And others.

There are maybe 100 or more separate factors that Google takes into account when deciding how to rank pages and which pages lands in the number 1, 2, 3, 4....etc. spot.

Other search engines pretty much use the same criteria but the may give slightly different weights to each factor. If your site lands in the top 5 on Google its likely somewhere in the top 5, or at least page 1 on Yahoo and MSN too. Usually.