I have to be brutally honest and relay that our friendship hasn't always been rosy. I got to know her several years back, when she was just a small fish in a big pond. I started to analyze her every move and realized that she is a fickle, clever and extremely mysterious being. Regardless of her ways, I decided to get more acquainted. Here are a few things I learned along the way:



When it comes to logic, she is the queen

In other words, avoid participating in anything that may blacklist you from this search engine, including keyword stuffing, link farms, and hosting 50 “sister” sites on the same server. Keyword stuffing doesn't simply refer to the content of your site, but also within the alt tags, headers, URLs and any additional areas of your web site.

She likes to stay focused

When optimizing the individual pages of your web site, try to hone in on 1-2 relevant keywords per web page. Analyze each page and identify which keyword would be most suitable. If you decide to optimize for 2 keywords per page, make sure that they are similar in context. For example, if you are optimizing for the key phrase “insurance leads”, you may also consider optimizing for “insurance sales leads” within the same page.

She loves to travel

It is commonly known that google loves links, whether they are inbound or outbound. Lots of research has focused on inbound links, but little has focused on the number of links on an actual page. Although this theory has not been published in the academic papers by google, it appears that google favors sites that have several internal and outbound links over pages without links. If you have any doubts about this theory, simply do a search on any high volume keyword or phrase within this search engine and analyze the first few sites that come up. Notice how the majority of them have numerous internal links on the main pages of their web site.

She's in popular demand and expects the same from you

The more popular your site is across the Web, the more google will favor you. Obviously, having several high quality inbound links to your site is key in achieving higher rankings. When identifying web sites for inbound links, target the ones that are highly relevant to your site. For example, if you run a jewelry site, look for websites that are purely informational on the topic of jewelry or gemstones. Also, make sure that the sites you decide to partner with have a good PageRank (at least a 5) and online presence.

To save yourself a lot of hassle, conduct a keyword search relevant to your business and target the web sites that show up on the 1st and 2nd pages (weeding out the competition) of google. Contact the webmasters of those sites and tell them about your company and find useful ways to compensate them for adding your company's information on their site. If you have an affiliate program, don't be shy to pitch it. If you have an online advertising budget, offer them a Pay Per Click deal or monthly advertising fee for promoting your web site. Please note that partnering with these sites or purchasing ads should complement your overall marketing & business development strategy and not be merely used for the purpose of getting link value.

She gets bored easily

Regardless of whether your site is informational, e-commerce or just a sophisticated version of a business card, having quality content is crucial. Adding to that factor is how often you update your site's content.

If you run a site that has new content added on a daily basis then eventually the google “freshbot” will start visiting your site on a daily basis and indexing your new content into the database (hence the popularity of blogs). The more content you update the more she visits your site and indexes it quicker.

If you haven't already noticed, keeping pace with google is not an easy undertaking. It takes a certain level of knowledge, skill and creativity to truly benefit from this relationship. The rest is up to the stars.