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Optimizing for Google

Because Google is currently so important for search many people spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how it works. Beyond the PageRank patent little is known for certain although a mass of empirical evidence has allowed many optimizers to achieve very good rankings for their sites in the face of better funded competition.

Practically everyone knows about PageRank these days. Even the Economist has published a detailed explanation for the benefit of the MBAs. Apart from PageRank Google says that it uses over 100 other factors in ranking Web pages. Currently anchor text in inbound-links is very important. Good inbound-links with relevant anchor text can easily take a site to number one. On-page factors are less important as the Google engineers feel these are too easy to manipulate but relevant Title and Heading elements should be used. For less competitive combinations of keywords a single factor such as matching Title element may place a page in the top ten results. This can lead some users astray, believing they have stumbled upon the silver bullet of search engine optimization.

In an effort to confound SEO experts and provide better results Google is constantly tinkering with its algorithms and has also developed technology such as Hilltop and LocalRank that may be used to refine the PageRank process and make it hard to use black-hat techniques to spam pages into high rankings.

Optimizing for Google

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