Here are some of the most important factors that the search engines use in determining your rankings:

1. Web Site Content

Content on your site is one of the most important factors for successful search engine optimization. Your web site should provide valuable information on specific subjects relevant to your web site. Furthermore, your content should be updated regularly. It’s not enough to just put up a few content pages full of information on your site and then never add to it. This is a continuous process that will help your search engine rankings if done correctly.

It’s also important that you don’t try to trick the search engines by flooding them with multiple versions of the same page, repeating the same content over and over. Doing that will not help your rankings and will eventually lead to your site getting banned from the search engines.

2. Link Popularity

Inbound links are very important for achieving high search engine rankings. Most of the search engines today regard link popularity as one of the most significant determinants of your website’s rankings.

Here are some of the best ways to get inbound links:

* Articles – Writing and submitting articles to website’s and article directories is a very good way to get inbound links.

* Content – Not only will adding quality content help in your rankings by itself, it will also help you with your link popularity. Other webmaster’s will want to link to your site because it is valuable to them and their own visitors.

* Directories – Submitting your site to online directories will help you gain inbound links.

* Blogs – Start a blog that you update frequently with information related to your website’s niche. Then, link to your site from the blog. You can also submit your blog to various blog directories to get even more inbound links.

* Link Exchanges – Simply find other quality sites related to yours and ask them to link to you in exchange for a link back to them. This is not as effective as it used to be but it is still a pretty good way to get inbound links.

When trying to increase your link popularity remember that the more inbound links you get the better, but quality is always better than quantity. Stay away from low quality sites, FFA’s, and sites unrelated to yours.

The next things that should be considered when doing Birmingham SEO for your web site are the on-site and the off-site elements. Some of the on-site elements are the title tag, Meta tags, heading tags, ALT tags and highlighting of the text using the bold tag. The Link text is an important off-site element.

On-Site Elements:

3. Title Tag and Meta Tags

Meta tags help describe the page where they are placed. Though today the Meta tags are not nearly as important as they once were and are definitely not the only things the search engines look for when indexing your site, they are still somewhat important in deciding the relevancy of the page for a keyword search.

Search engines focus on three primary tags to help them determine the relevance of a website for a particular search phrase. The Title Tag, Meta Keywords and the Meta Description…

Ideally the title tags should contain less than 64 characters with your most important keywords in them and should definitely be relevant to the content on the page. Do not stuff keywords in to the title tag!

The Meta description tag is a summary of the page and its contents. This Meta tag should be 200 characters or less and should contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for, but it should also read like an introductory lead-in for the page and be appealing to the reader. The description you provide for your page has to convince the visitor that they have found exactly what they were looking for.

Probably the least important Meta tag to search engines is the keyword tag. However, it shouldn’t be ignored. Keyword tags should be less than 1000 characters. This tag should include important keywords and phrases consistent with the body text, title, and content of the page. Be specific and accurate with the keywords and key phrases in this tag. Again, do not stuff keywords here… they should only be those that are actually on the page and do not repeat any word more than 3 times.

4. Heading Tags

The heading tags are given more weight than the ordinary text. The higher the H tag the more weight it carries. You should make use of the heading tags to highlight the important keywords and headings of your page as well as the paragraph headers.

5. Bold Text

Bold text is given a little more weight than ordinary text but not as much as heading tags. Make sure to enclose some of your keywords in bold tags when they appear on the page.

6. Alt Text

The alt tag provides alternative text when images cannot be displayed… This might happen if the users have set the browsers only to download the text and not the graphics, or if the images are too heavy to download for the users internet connection. Only include important keywords relevant to your site and the image and do not stuff keywords in them.

Off-site elements:

7. Link Text

This is a very important factor in search engine optimization to gain higher rankings. The link text can be on pages within your site or what other web sites use to link to you. Either way, it is important. If possible the target page’s main search term should be included in the link text instead of just the URL. Do not use identical link text for every link, but do include the target page’s main keywords in the link text. Links carry more weight when the text around them is relevant to the target page’s keywords and phrases.

Following the above Birmingham SEO information will help tremendously in your search engine rankings. Remember that the search engines are advancing all the time. Don’t try to trick them because they will eventually catch on and that could mean the end of your web site. Stick to the basic techniques above and you will increase your search engine rankings without fear of being banned or dropped.

Of course, the whole goal of the search engines’ ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical issue, though admittedly an extremely important technical issue.

But even in purely technical, mechanistic, terms, web content affects search engine rankings three ways:

1. inbound links

2. website mass

3. keyword optimization

1. Web Content and Inbound Links

Inbound links are the number-one factor in getting search engine rankings. They also yield plenty of traffic on their own. The importance of links is what has led many people to say that content is no longer important. But those people forget that content really does play a big role in getting links in the first place:

* At the very least, good content will make potential link partners more comfortable with linking to your site. No one wants to link to a link farm, splog, junk site, or even just an unprofessional-looking site.

* Lots of good content gives other webmasters (and particularly bloggers) a reason to link to your site spontaneously without being asked.

* You can allow other websites to post your content in exchange for a link back to your site.

2. Web Content Mass

More web pages of content = more search engine traffic

Heres why:

1. Adding pages to your site is like putting out extra nets to catch surfers.
2. Search engines see bigger websites as more prestigious and reliable.
3. The more content you have, the more reasons you give other webmasters, particularly bloggers, to link to your site spontaneously, without being asked.

3. Web Content Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization used to be the most important step in Birmingham SEO. Now it matters little in ranking for highly competitive keywords.

Still, keyword optimization can really help you get traffic from searches not on competitive keywords. While you may never rank number 1 for “finance,” you may still show up tops for a search on “household finance rent federal tax deductions” if you have that phrase somewhere in your content. Such non-competitive searches make up a very large proportion of total web searches.

Web Content Keyword Optimization Checklist:

There are four legs to keyword optimization:

* Research/selection
* Density
* Prominence
* Stemming/Variation

Keyword Research and Selection

You need to identify keywords searched on by your target audience. Use tools such as those offered by WordTracker and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

There are two big pitfalls to avoid:

* “Negative keywords” that look relevant but are not really searched on by your target market. For instance, “website copy” is a synonym for “website content,” but most people searching on “website copy” are looking for software that copies an entire website to the hard drive for offline browsing.

* Impossibly competitive keywords that you have no realistic chance of ranking high for them. How do you know if a keyword is impossibly competitive? One rough measure is to look at the PageRank of the webpages currently ranking in the top three for that keyword. If the PageRank of those pages is much higher than the PageRank your site will likely have in the future, you will probably never outrank those pages.

A pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords of Yahoo! Search Marketing will help you to find which keywords really are searched on by your target audience.

Keyword Density

Keywords appear in the content the right number of times for search engines to recognize the page as relevant, but not so often that it looks like keyword stuffing. The longer the content, the more times the keyword should appear.

Keyword Prominence

Keywords appear in just the right positions within your web pages for search engines to recognize them as relevant. The page title, headings, and first lines of the page are often considered the most prominent positions.

Keyword Stemming/Keyword Variation

* Using variations of the keyword will help ensure web pages appear relevant to the next generation of more sophisticated search engine algorithms.

* In the meantime, variations of popular keywords helps your site appear for the “non-standard” searches on variations of the keyword.

There are three main types of keyword variations:

* Word-stem variations. A stem of a word is its base. For instance, “optimize” is the stem of “optimized.” Other stem variations of “optimize” include “optimizing,” “optimizer,” and “optimization.” You can also shuffle the component words of multiple-word keywords. Variations of website content would be web site content, web content, content for websites, and site content).

* Synonyms (such as web page content, internet content, or writing for the web for website content).

* Related terms (such as internet, Birmingham SEO or web page).

For many people, the Birmingham SEO side of content feels like a moot point. You need content for your visitors even if no search engine spider ever notices. But every website budget, both of money and time, is finite. If you’re ever choosing whether to invest in another link to please search engines or another page of content to please your visitors, don’t forget: search engines still like content, too.

The Main Benefits Of Directory Submission:
- New websites indexed by the search engines – If your site is newly launched and yet to be crawled by the search engine spiders, directory submission is the first and foremost thing that you should do.
- One of the most important benefits of directory submission is the visibility enhancement of websites, which is why website owners employ this technique which has the potential to improve search engine rankings.
- As a result of directory submission, your website will be indexed regularly since your site will be found easily by crawlers. In other words, directory submission is directly linked to Liverpool SEO.
- Thus, the one way links provided by directory submission, which are considered more valuable than reciprocal links, will enhance your search engine rankings.
- Another benefit of directory submission is that you will be able to target several keywords rather than being limited to your website title. Therefore, you could consider traffic as another benefit of directory submission, though not as important as indexation or one way links.
- Links in a directory submission is deemed reliable by search engines because a person actually reviews the content of your site to determine its quality.

Mode Of Submission
- Manual & Auto Submission – Manual submission method is arguably a better submission mode as compared to the latter.
- However, recent research has shown that more and more cutting-edge auto submission software seems to be ready to challenge the notion that manual submission so-called a better accurate of submission method

Considerations
- Fast Submission – This is recommended for older sites or domains, which has been online for more than a year.
- Slow Submission – You can have your website submitted to web directories but, you may delay the submission process by making it to be completed in a course of few weeks, or even few months to make it look more natural in the eyes of Google and other search engines. This kind of submission is usually known as Liverpool SEO-Friendly submission

Tips For Effective Directory Submission

- Check if the directory has already been index by major search engines.
- You may also like to also note how many pages are already indexed.
- Ensure the page rank and inbound links of the directory you are submitting. Certainly a higher page rank and link popularity directory is the best.
- If you are submitting for link building, do NOT submit to directories that uses the nofollow for their site listings.
- Do not just submit your niche keywords, but also include those high volume keywords as it may provide a good source of FREE web traffic.

Like any investment, your website must start turning a profit as early as possible, and pulling the search engines is a critical component. There are several tools your site can use to get these rankings:

1.Search-engine optimized text
2.Fresh content frequently
3.Links to your site from high-profile websites
4.Traffic to and from your site

The first two are all about how you put your web site together and subsequently work with it. The last one quality inbound links has nothing at all to do with your site, and if you work it properly, can give you both great rankings and pull in a surprising amount of traffic from sites other than search engines.

Once you start building up your traffic, your search engine ratings will stabilize, and your site will slowly grow. It’s a lot like starting a car it takes a lot of energy to get it going, but once it’s running it only takes maintenance energy.

Article Submissions Services: Getting Those Inbound Links

Most people don’t know where to start with inbound links. Do you just email webmasters and ask? Buy advertising? Or do you offer your own site up as a link farm, encouraging your hard-won customers to visit someone else?

None of these are the best bet (though emailing webmasters, over time, is a good additional strategy). The best way you can get great inbound links is by using an article submission service.

These services use article directories, large online repositories of articles donated by webmasters like you, to build backlinks to your site. Each article you donate contains a resource box that points back to your website, in whatever format you desire. And you can donate the same article to hundreds of article directories.

You can do this yourself. But article submissions services know how to find the best directories, and have specialists who can enter your information in the often-tedious and time-consuming directories forms. It may be a better expenditure of your time to focus on that great content and building your business in other ways, while leaving the submissions to experts who can do it cheaply, efficiently, and properly.

Article submissions services understand the search engines and how they examine links, and can use this knowledge to benefit you. And because you can expect the search engines to change their methodology about every four to six months, with major changes every year and a half to a year, these services will always have the most up-to-date information on the best way to use links to enhance your placement.

While you may be able to build your website ranking yourself, it’s often better to seek help from people who have done it for years, at least the first few times you submit a site. Article submission services are your perfect ally when you’re chasing search engine rankings.

Appropriate Linking

There are only so many directories you can submit to, of course. Once you have maxed out your directory submission, you can start looking for webmasters to trade links with. There are a few things you should seek out in this case. Your link partners should be suitable for you, and you should be right for them as well. You should trade up as much as you can; look for pages with good rankings themselves. Don’t trade with a competitor; if you sell similar merchandise or if you’re both close together using the same keyword phrase, you should trade with someone else.

But link trading only works once your site has been built up in the search engines. Few webmasters are willing to trade links with a low-ranking site (would you?). For the quickest rankings boost, and for a great foundation that you can really start to work from, use mass articles submissions. It will set you apart and above your competition.

Before we get down to business, I have to tell you this very important detail: don’t start promoting your site until it has some content – it’s unlikely that you’ll get good results when you promote an empty site!

1. Directory submissions – this is a very important step for a new site, because this is probably how search engines will first find you. What you will need:

* 5 different versions (except for the site URL) for each of the following: site URL, title, description, list of keywords.

* an email address, specially created for directory submissions. This email should be on the domain of the site you are submitting or else it will be rejected by some directories.

* a list of Bristol SEO-friendly directories – http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=Bristol SEO-friendly.php has one of the best lists of Bristol SEO-friendly directories.

Now here comes the hard part: take that directory list, visit each directory and submit your site cycling your titles and description on each submission. This is the hardest part mainly because of the amount of workload – don’t worry, this can be made bearable by using 2 utilities: Roboform (www.roboform.com – which you can use with Internet Explorer and Firefox that has free and paid versions) and Informenter (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/673/ – a Firefox only plugin).

2. Reciprocal links (link exchanges) – I personally don’t use this method anymore because it’s too much work and there are not enough rewards! Link exchanges used to be a very powerful method in the beggining of Google and PageRank, but not anymore. This doesn’t mean that reciprocal links don’t work anymore, it’s just that they’re not that important anymore.

However this is one step you could follow when you have little competition, somewhere in the range of 300 000 or 400 000 results for your search word or phrase.

3. Reprint rights articles (submitting articles to article directories) – this is one of my favorite methods of obtaining backlinks: it requires little time, it’s free and you can (possibly) get a lot of return on your investment!

Writing articles gives you perfect control over the enviroment your links are in, and even a little control over the site where your article resides (considering the fact that webmasters usually post only articles that have the same topic as their site). Writing articles of high quality will ensure that your articles will be posted on many sites – a good article will get you a good number of backlinks!

One last thing about article writing: never, and I mean never post the article that you’ll distribute on your own site! Considering the article could appear on very important sites, Google may apply a duplicate content filter on your site, thus possibly burring it in the SERPs. Your site should be as clean as a whistle, with as much original content as possible.

4. Buying links – in my opinion, if you are not an expert in search engine optimization you should not try buying links to improve your rankings. There are a lot of factors to take into account when looking to buy links: theme of the site, the traffic that the page or site gets, whether that traffic is from natural and sustained (not from PPC, traffic exchanges or such methods), PR, anchor text and many more!

However, if you decide on buying text links on other sites, do the following:

* choose well established sites that have the same theme as yours.
* the link should be spiderable: check the robots.txt file, nofollow metatags and the rel=”nofollow” link atribute.
* make the link look as different as possible from a bought link: surround it with text and avoid placement in the site’s footer or in an “Advertisements” or “Partners” box.

5. Link baiting is one of the most powerful method of online promotion, but this should be used only when your site is a little bit older and stable – getting a lot of links in a short time span can actually hurt your site.

There are a few hooks that you can use to attract links:

* news: get an important story first and you could be the focus of your industry sector, even if for only a few hours! People are always on the look-out for fresh stuff, and if it’s good you could end up with a lot of backlinks.

* resource: gathering a list of useful pages in your industry, or maybe offering a new viewpoint on a certain research paper.

* controversy: this kind of link baiting can actually get you on the wrong side of some people because it requires contradicting a popular point of view or an authority figure. So tread carefully!

When surfers conduct searches on search engines they are presented with a list of results for that search term. These results are called Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and generally speaking, the websites that appear at the top of the SERPs will receive plenty of traffic to their websites from searchers.

In order to determine your position on the SERPs, search engines use their own algorithms. While nobody knows for absolute certain what these algorithms are it is widely accepted that your website needs to be easy to navigate, popular and relevant.

Easy navigation means that your site should have text links to each of its pages. If you use a flash menu system then you should include a sitemap in order that search engines and visitors can quickly and easily find their way around the whole of your website.

In order to make your website appear popular you need to get links to your site. While search engines would rather these links were generated because visitors to your site genuinely found your content useful, it is commonplace to undertake a reciprocal link campaign or generate inbound links. Reciprocal links mean a website links to you in exchange for a link to their own site.

Relevance is judged by your content. By including the keywords you place in the metatags of your site throughout the body of your content and in certain places within your site you are indicating to the search engines that your website contains relevant information.

By combining these factors you can effectively convince search engines that you deserve to be near the top of their SERPs. However, this can take time and a lot of effort if you dont fully understand what you are doing.

This article will guide you the importance of directories submissions in launching a new site, or ranking an existing one. I am going to review 6 important areas.

Directories are the brand new site best friend.
Since every new domain gets put in the Google TrustBox, since they favor links from trusted sites. This is a part of the “TrustRank” equation within the algorithm. Directories play a very important roll in getting good quality inbound links that help your site to get out. As they pass PageRank and reputation with Google, your site will greatly benefit from its inclusion in these directories, especially in the launching phase of its life cycle. So, finding solid directories to get your site listed is the key.

The viable alternative to link buying… and safer.
Directories provide one-way inbound links to your site, and drive traffic to your site through direct referrals. By doing this, they boost your link popularity and ultimately improve your search rankings. All this done naturally, and cost free in many cases.

Paid vs. free: the differences and the similarities.
Paid directories quickly list your site, were free ones may take several weeks or even months to review it. On the other hand, some paid directories charge expensive listing fees for the link they provide, and that is not cost effective. If you work on a limited budget for your site, you may want to submit to a handful of paid directories but a few hundred of free ones. Of these last ones, prioritize one-ways preferably. Whatever directories you submit to, paid or free or a combination of both types, the quality of the directory itself should be the biggest consideration in your decision.

The directory page that counts is were the link is.
When doing a directory submission, not only look at the PageRank of the homepage, but also of the subpage, where your link will be. While it may seem like a benefit to have your site listed on a PR7 directory, this is less effective when you realize that the internal page where your link is actually only a PR3, when you expected more.

Pagerank is not the only factor of directory quality.
A low PR directory is not necessarily a bad one. New directories fall in this category. These directories do review and list sites quicker. Also, when they become more popular, so will your listing. Again, base your decision based on the quality of the directory. And keep in mind whether or not the directory is search engine friendly. When checking the structure of the link to your site, make sure it is not dynamic.

Directories links shouldnt be more than 10%.
You shouldnt have more than this percentage in your overall inbound links count. Dont rely on directories alone as your link source. Diversify them for your benefit.
Please refer to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics – Part 2 for more sources.

By Dedicated SEO Consultant Jose Nunez

1 Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become the preferred option among fre statistics programs. Like any other stats program, Google Analytics provides data on the number of visitors, and page views, referral sources, entry and exit pages, and more. Unlike most other programs, Google Analytics includes the ability to track and monitor pay-per-clck (PPC) campaigns. Other useful information includes the geographic location of your visitors, their internet connection speed, and their screen resolutions. You can sign up for Google Analytics at:

2 Google Webmaster Tools

Want to know how the largest search engine in the world sees your website? Google’s Webmaster Tools will give you loads of information such as the pages that are indexed, errors found by the Googlebot (dead links), your search engine rankings for specific search phrases, your anchor text on inbound links, internal and external link data, and robots.txt and sitemap data.

By knowing how Google sees your site you will find some basic items that you’ll need to change in order to reach your maximum potential in search engine traffc. You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools at:

3 Birmingham SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool

Birmingham SEOmoz is one of the leading search engine optimization (Birmingham SEO) firms and their website provides a wealth of information through their blog, articles and tools. Their Page Strength Tool shows you the “relative importance and visibility” and the “potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines.” Birmingham SEOmoz provides a quick way to get a basic look at the strength of your page. The Page Strength Tool can be used at:

4 Sitening.com’s Birmingham SEO Analyzer

Sitening is another leading Birmingham SEO firm with several valuable tools on their website. The Birmingham SEO Analyzer differs from Birmingham SEOmoz’s Page Strength Tool in that it checks the internal structure of your site to determine how well it is constructed (in terms of search engine optimization). The structure of a website is the framework for a good Birmingham SEO campaign, and Sitening.com’s Birmingham SEO Analyzer will help you to build the right framework. Sitening.com’s Birmingham SEO Analyzer can be found at:

5 Mike’s Marketing Tools

MikesMarketingTools.com has two tools that every webmaster should use regularly. The Search Engine Rankings Tool will show you where your site ranks in several of the top search engines for a specific word or phrase. You can save time by using this tool instead of visiting each search engine and clicking through the search engine results pages to find your website.

The Link Popularity Tool will quickly show you how many inbound links each search engine recognizes for your site. Inbound links are a major factor in search engine rankings and each search engine recognizes a different number of links. From this tool you can also clck through to see the specific pages that are linking to you. To use these tools visit:

6 Summit Media’s Spider Simulator

The spider simulator shows you “how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your usability.” Search engine spiders see web pages much differently than human visitors do. A page may look attractive and well-designed to a human visitor, but a search engine spider may not be able to find what it is looking for. This page is a great tool to assure you that your site is built for maximum search engine results. The spider simulator can be used at:

7 SelfBirmingham SEO Page Speed Checker

Your average website visitor will have a very short attention span. To have the best chance of making a positive first impression on new visitors your page must load quickly enough that they do not leave right away. SelfBirmingham SEO has a Page Speed Tool that shows you how long your page takes to load. The tool allows you to enter multiple pages to chck at one time. It is a good idea to compare the load time of your page against pages from several other websites. Try entering your homepage and the homepage of several of your competitors. If your page loads considerably slower than the others, try to make the file smaller by reducing the number and size of images or by cleaning up the coding. The Page Speed Tool can be used at:

8 Dead Links Checker

Having dead links on your website can frustrate visitors and damage your search engine rankings. However, checking all the links on your site manually is not realistic. Fortunately there are a number of tools online that will automate the process. The W3 Link Checker will crawl through your pages and report which links are broken. To use this tool visit:

9 GoogleRankings.com

GoogleRankings.com will show you which words and phrases appear most frequently on your website throughout the text of the page, title, headings and meta tags. This is a useful tool to be certain that your pages are optimized for the words and phrases that you are targeting.

10 FeedBurner

If you publish a blog, FeedBurner’s service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog’s feed and you can give your readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at FeedBurner. With FeedBurner you can always see how many subscribers you have and how many of them are clicking through from your feed to your site.

Once your new web site is up and it is open to the public, it is vital to begin formulating a promotion tactic. The apparent objective is to catch the attention of as many visitors as you be able to. One of the finest ways to do this is by using a “Linking Campaign”.

A lot of non-reciprocal inbound links tells a search engine that your site contains valuable information, so you need to get those, but how do you do that?

Let’s say you have one more additional site with some pages already indexed in the search engines. Instead of promoting the new site that you want to rank high by placing a text link to it on all of the pages on the other site (which may be looks at as spam by many Manchester SEO experts), using a non-reciprocal link exchange network like LinksDealing.com, you can get hundreds of text links to your desired promoted URL with the anchor text of your choice from quality sites spread all over the Internet, which is something good for your link promotion efforts.

LinksDealing is an automatic system that enables you to promote sites by almost instantly receiving many text links pointing to your promoted URLs. The text links are placed on quality sites, most of which are related to the same theme group as your promoted site, and these text links to your promoted site stay on those sites for a lengthy time.

How does it work? When you signup as a member of the LinksDealing network, you contribute areas of text link placement on your other site’s pages; these sites are named Donor Sites. You also specify another list of URLs that you wish to promote using the LinksDealing network; these URLs are named as Promoted URLs. The Promoted URLs in turn get text links from other members’ donor sites’ pages.

The more donor sites you contribute to the Links Dealing network, the more text links from other members’ donor sites’ pages you get to your promoted URLs, thereby increasing the number of visitors to your promoted URLs and their search engines results pages placements for your desired keyword.

Promoting your site and getting new incoming links to it should not be hard work, Visit http://www.LinksDealing.com to find out how to instantaneously receive many non reciprocal links to your website without the hassle of engaging in link exchange activity all day long.

It would be great to have a crystal ball, prying into the plans of the search engines and how they may change weights of algorithms and the like.

For those of little SE understanding, algorithms are formulas or rules set up by SE’s to determine ranking. Each rule then has a different weight or percentage of importance assigned to it. A good example of this is currently Google’s high weighting of linking over all other factors or rules.

So knowing this how do we get ahead of the game?

Do we simply keep up with the Jones (Google) in current time and not worry about future changes? Or do we allow for future changes in algorithms so we don’t have to go changing thousands of pages later on?

For me I will take the later…. and this is how it’s done…

We simply build in all factors that the SE’s currently rank sites on, a few they may use into the future and concentrate on ones that are the most sensible…. here is a list

domain name >> the name itself, length of registration past and future
domain hosting >> good hosting network. different ip range for mininets/virtual real estate
meta tags >> title, keywords, description
on page >> keyword density, headers, alt tags, outbound links, outbound link text, site map, less graphics, no flash or frames
visitor usability >> fast loading, good content, good navigation, search equipped, site map
html >> w3c compliant
directories >> dmoz & yahoo, local, industry specific, large generic
linking >> inbound links, reciprocal links, domain & text linking (spread), same/similar industries (semantic latent indexing), no linking for bad neighborhoods or sites, quantity & quality of links, where links are placed on the page, link density, ip class/range

I’m sure there are a few others that I could add to this list however on the whole currently this is it.

If you include all of these items into building your next web page and sites, no matter how the SE’s decide to change their algorithms by giving one factor a higher importance over another, you will be in good stead to keeping up top rankings.

Like anything else, high search engine ranking is not rocket science! You just have to know the rules and then do the work.

Start with one keyword or phrase, do the research, implement a plan, do the work, get the high ranking and then move onto the next keyword or phrase…..

And if you want a huge head start, there’s some great info out on fast Manchester SEO ranking.

Happy rankings….