If you’re reading this we can pretty-much assume you aren’t Wikipedia, you don’t run a Government ( .gov ) or Education ( .edu ) website, your site wasn’t launched back in 1993, you don’t have 1,470,000 inbound links from decent, relevant websites and over 2 million pages of unique content cached by Google.

If you do fit into any of the categories above – congratulations, Google already loves you.

Otherwise, keep reading…

Make sure your site is crawlable

This may sound pretty obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple, yet crucial step. Before getting links, optimising content etc. make sure your whole site is easily crawlable by the search bots. One of the easiest ways to do this is to do this is to use a text-based browser such as Lynx. If you can get from one end of your site to the other without any problem using Lynx, then you’re on the right track.

Using easy-to-follow text-based menus, sitemaps and breadcrumbs are just a few of the ways to effectively do this.

Avoid things like Flash, Javascript, cookies, session IDs, frames and DHTML.

Write good, interesting, informative and unique content

Once again, pretty obvious stuff, but still there are people out there who believe they are helping their site by re-publishing hundreds of duplicated articles from other online sources.

Having good content serves a number of purposes – here are a few of them:

• Instills confidence in any potential customer who ends-up at your site
• It will help you attract long-tail search queries
• Can attract links from other websites

In-bound links from other websites

The last point in the previous section (about writing good content), has the pleasant by-product of also attracting links which is the final ingredient if you have your navigation and content all sorted.

Note: when I say ‘the final ingredient’ I’m really talking about a recipe for making a packet-mix cake… add milk, water, mix, cook… enjoy. If you want to make a wedding cake, well, it’s going to require a lot more skill and ingredients. The same applies for optimising a site in a highly competitive niche… so don’t expect to rank #1 for the word ‘free’ or ‘web’ based on the info in this post.

Ok.. now that I’ve made that disclaimer, let’s talk about links.

Jim Boykin has a great article on his site about Why that site with 50 backlinks beats your site with 1000 backlinks where he quotes:

It’s not always “He with the most links” who wins the game……often, “He with the right links” can win the game as well. Really, very often, he with the right 10 links can beat the guy with 1000 of the wrong links – I see it all the time.

So when looking for potential linking opportunities, I try and visualise the type of traffic I would get from these sites and if I think a site would bring the type of customer I’d like to work with – then it’s a good link. It doesn’t matter if the site has PageRank (PR) or if the link is nofollow etc. etc. If you get enough of these types of link, it won’t matter if you rank well or not because you’ll still be making sales due to the increased quality traffic.

Conclusion

Like I mentioned in the ‘note’ above, this post doesn’t cover the advanced techniques required to rank for a highly competitive term, but if you’re new to the search engine game, you can’t go too far wrong with the advice above.

If you’d like some further information about what Google loves – check-out Google’s Official Webmaster Guidelines.

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