Every webmaster is concerned as to what SEO techniques should be followed to gain a maximum search engine rating and exposure. Wouldnt it be nice to have a concrete checklist of such items The following is my effort to create a comprehensive system of simple SEO techniques that with time will guarantee a top ranking for your site.
1. Select a list of realistic keywords
First, let me explain how the keyword selection process works. The tool I highly recommend on using is a Keyword Selector Tool from Overture, notable feature of which is ability to see keywords or keyword phrases that are most popular and bring the largest number of visitors. When selecting your keywords, keep the following in mind:
As you can see, less competitive keywords have a greater potential of bringing more traffic. So be smart about picking your keywords, avoid highly competitive ones, but also dont settle for the rock bottom.
2. Incorporate keywords in your Title tags
Search Engines place high importance on what you have in your Title tags. In fact its so important, that Google lists search results by Title tags. You can see your search queue bolded in each item. Its very important that every page on your site contains a title, every title contains a keyword or a keyword phrase, and your content matches the idea behind your Title. More on that last one to follow.
3. Optimize your content for selected keywords
Content is king on the Net and Google prides itself for bringing you the most relevant results. So heres a list of must-do content optimization techniques.
4. Create a robots.txt file
Robots such as Googlebot come to your page and the first thing they look for is a robots.txt file that contains a list of instructions. Robots.txt should be located in the root directory of your site and using it, you can specify which pages you want indexed, which ones you dont, which robots you want indexing your content, which ones you dont. The list goes on. In this article I will assume that your goal is to have all bots index all your pages. Open up that Notepad and begin writing some code.
This code snippet allows all bots to index your entire site. If you want to take full control of robots.txt, I highly recommend reading a full set of instructions at SearchEngine World.
If you dont feel like writing a robots.txt file, you can use the following meta tag:
This tells robots to follow the links from this page to get more pages.
5. Create a Sitemap
Sitemaps are great for letting Search Engines know where to look for new pages. You should make sure that every page is reachable via links on your site and youll have no troubles getting indexed by robots. Remember that content is food for robots and they are pretty hungry. If you havent done so already, you should take advantage of where you manually tell Googlebot which pages are indexable and how often they are updated, which brings me to my next point
6. Keep your content fresh all the time
You will not get indexed if Search Engines stop visiting you and you will not rank highly if you stop getting indexed. Google and other Search Engines love fresh content. This is part of the reason why certain blogs are outperforming major websites. Keeping content fresh can be as easy as incorporating RSS headlines on your pages or as time consuming as adding a blog to a corporate website.
7. Acquire relevant backlinks
To gain importance, you need important sites to link to you. Of coarse to have that done, you need to be useful enough to get a backlink. In either case, .gov or .edu backlinks are jackpot. Google boosts you up the rankings in a matter of days, depending on how often Googlebot crawls your site. There are a few black-hat SEO techniques to get .gov and .edu backlinks, but I wont get into them here. This is purely white-hat SEO. If you are interested though, shoot me an e-mail and Ill do my best to educate you.
Anyway, try to get sites in your niche to link to you. They should be optimized for similar keywords as yourself, and links should have anchor text that contains your sites keywords.
8. Get older and wiser
Google naturally ranks older pages higher than their younger competitors. Reasoning behind that is obvious I think. There are techniques such as purchasing an older domain name, but I dont recommend spending your money on that. Googles current algorithm also monitors the number of times domain name has changed owners and incorporates that into determining rank. My best recommendation is
9. Be patient
When it comes to Google or any other Search Engine, patience is the key. Factors like Sandbox have some part in webmasters irritations. It all boils down to determining how trusted your site is. Backlinks play a major role. In this case, you might acquire a single backlink from a well ranked site and fly up the rankings, while tens of backlinks from lower ranked dot-coms will barely wiggle your toes.
Most importantly remember, it takes time for Google to index the Web. Billions of sites are updated daily and they all need to be crawled. A few extra incoming links can shorten the wait period by a lot, so that should be your goal for the next few months while you patiently wait. Now on to the final point.
10. Dont cheat the bots
You worked so hard on building content, optimizing your pages, researching keywords, and reading SEO techniques. Dont go on and waste all of this just by spaming sites with links (comment spam on blogs), over-stuffing content with keywords (please, people are actually reading you!), or hiding text (blending your keywords into the background just for bots sakes). I dont want to go into all black-hat techniques here, you get the idea. The point is that simple misdemeanors like that can get you banned from Google or any other Search Engine. After spending so much time trying to get in, it would suck to get kicked out, wouldnt it
Ignat Drozdov is an SEO working in Washington DC, specializing in new business launches in Europe and Asia. Ignat is also an editor of .
Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear:
What is the Google Sandbox TheoryThere are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.
In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.
This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.
Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.
Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed Allegra (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.
This was a major update to Googles search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent exodus of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.
Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox EffectA common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the Time Delay factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were released in the Allegra update, this website aging theory has gained a lot of ground.
However, I dont find much truth in the Time Delay factor because by itself, its just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.
Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the Allegra update. Along with shattering the Time Delay theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a link threshold theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.
While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive linkbuilding campaigns. In my opinion, link-popularity is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.
This concept is known as link-aging. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the age of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.
The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have dont have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, dont you) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the Allegra update.
How to find out if your website is sandboxedFinding out if your website is Sandboxed is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almostperfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.
Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core good SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engines weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what Im talking about, lets take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.
Understanding search enginesIf youre looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.
How does this help us
Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.
While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.
Escaping the sandbox...Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engines algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does holds back new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.
This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.
However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website. As the Allegra update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords afterthe Sandbox effect ended.
This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your websites Sandboxed time.
SEO strategies to minimize your websites sandboxed timeDespite what some SEO experts might tell you, you dont need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the white hat rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles Ive mentioned many times in this course, youll not only minimize your websites Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Heres a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:
Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.
Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as good content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engines algorithm, whether its a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.
About the Author
Ravikiran is a professional software Develper who blogs about technology and entrepreneurship his recent blog is - a blog about number($) and technology. ZB is about learning skills, sharing information and providing tips on how to make money online Online
Have you taken a look at SEO Elite yet SEO Lite Industry leading SEO Software.