Google’s patent on ranking web pages submitted last March is the starter for an interesting article from Lorelle on Wordpress about how Google indexes, organizes, and ranks web pages in its huge database.
If you want to optimize your website for Search Engines, and for Google in particular, according to Lorelle you should focus on:
Links
Get many, with high pagerank, incoming, relevant, well-coded, well-worded links. Get such links in a soft, balanced manner over time. The history factor is as important as the quality one.
Too many links with the same text are not building up value. Change the text of your incoming links (if you can!) using descriptive words, pertinent to your topic. Forget about link exchange, link buying and link spamming. Valuable links are within a rich textual context. Choose carefully where your link appears.
Domain Names and time
The older the better.
Click throughs
Get clicked. Get visited. Get your newly added and fresh content to be visited.
Traffic variations
If you have a seasonal web sites and Google thinks is legitimate you will not loose your ranking. Hot topics are privileged: track trends and use them in your websites (if you have something clever and useful to tell about it).
Publishing frequency
Choose a posting schedule and stick to it. Do not post too much content all at once. Do not forget to post once daily/weekly/monthly if you chose to do so. Update old pages, keep them fresh (be consistent, just don’t make news up). Be stable over time. Google doesn’t like peaks.
Keywords are still worth
Select and place carefully your keywords. They still matter.
The Big Brother is your friend
Google monitors over many dimensions: user behaviours (who clicks what and when), traffic, ranking, searching, bookmarking, linking, server hosting.
Standards are not so relevant
Provoking point: it is not so important to validate your codes or to strictly follow standards for web development, but still considered in the ranking criteria. Grammatical standards are important indeed: du cek spel eeor tecst.
I liked Lorelle’s summary and I strongly suggest every website owner to read it.
Link: Lorelle on WordPress » Secret Out - How Google Ranks Websites
Further information on Google Search Engine ranking algorithm:
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