Skip to main content

Getting Google to notice you

Keep it simple


I've read so many articles by SEO experts outlining how to get a high position on search engines. After ranking a website at number 1, and keeping it there for well over a year now I can offer some solid advice.

The truth is that getting a good, sustainable ranking is a relatively simple affair. However, SEO experts want to make it sound as complicated as possible. How else will they be able to charge you their consultancy fee?

Before you continue reading my blog read this link:
Google Guidelines for Webmasters.

If you adhere to those guidelines you will get ranked.

Stating the bleeding obvious


Question: How does Google make money?
Answer: Primarily by selling advertising.

Question: How does Google make money from advertising?
Answer: By getting lots of people to look at it and click through to their clients

Question: How does Google get lots of people to look at their adverts?
Answer: By have a good service that they want to use (the search engine)

Question: How does Google get people to click to visit their clients?
Answer: By showing adverts that are relevant to the user.

Helping Google for fun and profit


Too many SEO's spend time trying to manipulate Google. You really should be spending your time and effort trying to help Google make money. If you understand my logic above you will create sites that are useful and valuable to users. This makes it easier for Google to provide its users with meaningful search results. This makes it easier for Google to make money.

The mantra "content is king" is a direct consequence of following this logic. If you provide lots of valuable content then Google will see that your site is useful to users and will promote it in its search rankings.

The more money Google can make from indexing your site, the higher it will rank. Google is not a charity, that's why the owners have private jets and an airport to park them on.

If you make their life easy they will love you. If you try to trick them they will punish you. I always assume that the people at Google are cleverer than me. Matt Cutts academic record is enough to convince me not to try to be clever, for example.

Moving onwards with SEO


I'll spend some time examining the various Google guidelines over some postings in the future. To a newcomer they may seem pretty daunting.

I'll also cover some topics such as internal linking, sales funnels, and calls to action.

These are not neccessarily related to SEO but are directly related to the performance of your website. That said, I have found that by having a well structured internal linking campaign my Google ranking improved for certain "champion pages" which I then also pointed my pay per click (PPC) campaigns at. This dropped my cost per click and improved my organic results.

Comments

  1. Just by the way... I got a Google alert mailed to me at 17h16 saying that Google has indexed this blog post.

    That means that it took about 2 hours for me to get into the index.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its glory in this demo.  

Fixing puppet "Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled" error

While debugging and setting up Puppet I am still running the agent and master from CLI in --no-daemonize mode.  I kept getting an error on my agent - ""Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled". The fix was quite simple and a little embarrassing.  Firstly I forgot to run my puppet master with root privileges which meant that it was unable to write incoming certificate requests to disk.  That's the embarrassing part and after I looked at my shell prompt and noticed this issue fixing it was quite simple. Firstly I got the puppet ssl path by running the command   puppet agent --configprint ssldir Then I removed that directory so that my agent no longer had any certificates or requests. On my master side I cleaned the old certificate by running  puppet cert clean --all  (this would remove all my agent certificates but for now I have just the one so its quicker than tagging it). I started my agent up with the command  puppet agent --test   whi

Redirecting non-www urls to www and http to https in Nginx web server

Image: Pixabay Although I'm currently playing with Elixir and its HTTP servers like Cowboy at the moment Nginx is still my go-to server for production PHP. If you haven't already swapped your web-server from Apache then you really should consider installing Nginx on a test server and running some stress tests on it.  I wrote about stress testing in my book on scaling PHP . Redirecting non-www traffic to www in nginx is best accomplished by using the "return" verb.  You could use a rewrite but the Nginx manual suggests that a return is better in the section on " Taxing Rewrites ". Server blocks are cheap in Nginx and I find it's simplest to have two redirects for the person who arrives on the non-secure non-canonical form of my link.  I wouldn't expect many people to reach this link because obviously every link that I create will be properly formatted so being redirected twice will only affect a small minority of people. Anyway, here's