All business owners want the answer to these questions~

How will my website get ranked in the Search Engines?

or

I want better Search Engine Placement ~ How can I get it?

Google Ranking

How to get your website ranked well.

The truth is Google (and the other search engines) closely guard how they rank sites.  Experts are constantly testing algorithm changes to try to guess what the changes are and how it effects websites.  Google is now putting generalities onto their blog to educate more people on how to  create quality websites instead of gaming the system.  Although the guidelines are general ~ they can be applied with common sense to get better website search rankings.  Here are a few resent announcements from Google on how they are ranking websites.

  • Google is more likely to pick text right out of the content of the site instead of using meta data or header information for search ranking descriptions.  Taking the time to optimize page content will pay off in better rankings compared to optimizing meta or behind the scenes data.
  • Google indicated they are starting to deprecate the use of ranking anchor text for inbound links.  This means that spending money for specific inbound link text is not a good place to invest.  Inbound links are still important to have but the anchor text (what the link reads) is not going to have an effect moving forward.
  • Google has added “new signals” toindicate who had the content first.  The speculation from SEO gurus is that they are using the Author tag to assign originality of content.  This also means they are not ranking content that is copied or that they feel is not original.  All business owners that are publishing content need to start using the Author tag to ensure their content is assigned to them and if it is copied (all good content gets copied) it will not be a huge issue anymore.  Copied content is slowly going away.
  • Google is now stopping “host crowding”  ~ this is when several pages from the same website get ranked on a specific search result.  They will start to display results from varying websites in the hope to serve a more balanced search result.  This means business owners need more than just their own website.  It is nice to see a FanPage, Google+ page, Youtube channel, guest blog posts, and other varied content.  Moving forward this will be the main way to establish more than 1 spot in the search results.
  • Google is also looking at recency.  It is ranking pages or posts that are current over older content.  This is great news for bloggers and business owners that publish content regularly.  It is bad news for static sites.

These are just guidelines ~ but one can see that Google is really trying to filter out poor content and let the cream rise to the top.

Are you creating “Cream” content?  Are you creating new content on a regular basis?  If not ~ why not?

There will be a time in the near future that static sites are going to have a hard time ranking for anything – let alone in the first 3 pages.  If you are going to be taken seriously on the Internet then it is imperative you start creating an online plan and sticking to it.  You will like the results much better!