Just having a well-designed website is not enough if it’s buried in the middle of the third page of Google search results…
John Mignano
Studies show that over 90% of the time, Google users rarely go beyond the top ten sites returned by a query.
Credit this to Google’s efficient algorithm that does an excellent job of ranking sites based on relevance—on a given search for a general or specialized topic, the first ten sites that Google lists will almost always be relevant to the keyword or keywords that you typed in.
Google even goes as far as providing an “I’m feeling lucky” button that you can click on if you’re in a rush; an alternative to “Google Search”, it zeroes in on what the algorithm decides is the most relevant site related to your query.
Now from a user’s perspective, this is the benefit of using Google for consistently reliable search results.
But to the website designer this presents an enormous challenge: how does one make it to the first page of results, let alone the top ten?
It isn’t as if the results are provided by a committee of real live human beings who screen each and every website for each and every query—an unrealistic undertaking, to say the least.
In the offline world, being noticed is as basic as being seen; sit outside on the sidewalk with a sign around your neck and your presence will at least register with whoever passes by (unless you live in New York City).
But online, it’s easy to be invisible—the basics of establishing an online presence are as simple as register a domain and getting your site hosted. Then what?
Google uses an algorithm. The aforementioned committee of living and breathing website-screening humans would have to consist of the entire planet’s population to do the approximate job that Google’s algorithm does.
Without going behind-the-scenes, all you need to understand is that an algorithm, by definition, relies on certain rules.
These rules are what determine how Google filter the mass of websites in existence and distills them into a list of results, ranked in relevance.
So the question becomes: how does Google define what’s “relevant”?
Basically, it’s all about content…and then some.
Yes, content is still king. A software algorithm may be doing the dirty work but it’s designed to do the work of a billion humans, with those same humans in mind—so the quality of your content still matters.
Here’s an example:
You have a well-designed website, meaning that you took care of your meta and title tags. These two tags are crucial yet sometimes overlooked, but when used properly, these score big points with Google’s algorithm in your website’s favor.
Another major factor in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is how your website employs keywords. Again, with well-written content, this is already assured in most cases.
The only task left is to screen your content the same way that Google’s algorithm would. If you have a website about “Cigars” for instance, is your written content full of keywords related to that topic?
Now this is a top-down approach. Many times it can be even more efficient to do take care of this from the bottom-up.
If your content is written with the concept of keywords in mind, then it will have a better chance of ranking well in Google.
Again, these keywords naturally occur if articles are well-written and focused, but a human writes these for you (I would guess), yet its Google’s algorithm that reads them first before ranking your website accordingly for other human to find.
That’s another very important rule the Google algorithm pays attention to external links to your site.
In other words, after your visitors leave, do they still care? This aspect of Google SEO is also within your control if you take the time to set up a “link exchange” system.
Simply put, Google favors sites that have more external links in them.
Now there’s nothing stopping you from peppering your site with links left and right. But unless this is implemented effectively, your site will be hit with usability issues and your daily visitor traffic will go down.
A link exchange keeps things from going out of control: you can arrange with webmasters of external sites related to your own for reciprocal links. Keep in mind that if your website is an island, it will stay that way as far as Google is concerned.
Google SEO really boils down to that: understanding the rules of the algorithm.
It’s like discovering the chemicals that make up pheromones; the laws of attraction are equally invisible to the naked eye.
But once you get that good, quality traffic coming to your website, it also matters that your visitors don’t show up at your door expecting a beauty when what’s inside is less than it’s shell.
Because unless you are the only website dedicated to your field or industry, equally attractive websites with intelligent SEO but better quality content will bury you the next time the search results are updated.
That’s as simple as it gets with these SEO tips for Google…
Website Optimization Plugins for Boosting Traffic!
Email Marketing Secrets
You know the entire point of running a website is to make money online…
John Mignano
So far, so good! Today, I’m giving you a list of some of the best plugins to help your website or blog get more traffic and help you make more cash!
WP Super Cache – This plugin is great for two reasons.
First, it makes your pages load way faster.
Second, since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself.
This WordPress plugin is number one on the list for a reason…
HeadSpace 2: WordPress SEO Made Simple– Move over All in one SEO because there’s a new guy in town.
HeadSpace provides you with the features you need to drive your site to the top. People spend way to much time working on SEO and too little time writing great content.
This plugin let’s you put your focus back where it belongs.
It takes care of all the SEO work that your blog will need.
Akismet – Akismet is the comment spam fighter that comes built into WordPress and it does a mighty fine job.
Activate this plugin and you won’t need to moderate or captcha your comment submissions. Akismet does 99% of the work for you.
WPtouch iPhone Theme – This plugin allows you to instantly and effortlessly transform your website into a mobile dynamite.
Whenever a mobile user accesses your blog a pleasant looking lighter version designed specially for mobile devices is presented.
This is a must have for 2010…
Backtype Tweetcount – If you’re using the TweetMeMe tweet counter badge on your blog then kill it right now.
Nobody wants to authorize another program to access their Twitter account just to share a link to your site.
Nofollow Case by Case – This site’s comment links are dofollow.
I’ve stripped out all of the nofollow tags from the comment section of Site Sketch 101.
You leave a comment here and Google page rank will chase you all the way back to your site.
This plugin is what makes that happen. So leave a comment here and then install this awesome WordPress Plugin at your blog.
WP-DBManager – This little gem is amazing for backing up your website.
It actually has a few functions it can perform but perhaps it’s most impressive feature is it’s ability to email the entire WordPress databse to me every day.
Thank Me Later – This plugin is great.
It sends an email to all first-time visitors. You can write an email to remind about your RSS feed or just to invite them to connect with you personally.
WP-PageNavi – Those ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’ links are boring.
With WP-PaveNavi you can get page buttons so users can go directly to whichever page they want. Plus they look a lot better than plain little links.
Permalinks Moved Permanently – Last year I moved all of my permalinks to post the page so that they wouldn’t be so long.
This would have meant that all of the links to my posts would generate 404 errors. This plugin just forwards all the links and PR to the new addresses.
SEO Slugs – Using your entire post title as the slug for the article can make web addresses long and it can waste the opportunity to focus on using your keywords.
This plugin strips out all the unnecessary words from the permalink for you so that you don’t have to.
SEO Smart Links – Do you inter-link your articles?
Linking within an article to other articles is a great way to build Page Rank throughout your site and it’s a great way to get readers to find your other articles on similar subjects.
This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you.
Subscribe to Comments – This plugin took a little bit of work to get it to work right but it’s great because it allows people to subscribe via email to any other comments that show up on a given post.
This helps get readers to keep coming back…
Top Commentators Widget – At the bottom of the sidebar here, you can see the top 10 commentators for this month.
This is a great way to provide a dofollow link back to the people who help make your site great.
WordPress Related Posts – If a reader enjoys one of your articles then one of the best things that you can do is to put some more articles in front of them to keep them digging through your site.
Google Analyticator – Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog.
This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging.
Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.
Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup.
The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, etc.
WPtouch iPhone Theme – WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme…
Yes, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices.
All in One SEO Pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
Google XML Sitemaps -This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog.
With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs.
Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Please will you take advantage of these plugins and bank more today?