Google SEO Rules

1. Is there any fixed rule for Google as far as SEO is concerned? If so, what are the steps?

If only! There are no fixed rules because every website is different and has different needs. There are basic things that all websites need to do in order to improve their chances of showing up in Google search results for relevant phrases, but no magic formula.

See "The Art of SEO" article for more on this.

2. Do the following play important roles in website page ranking and positioning?

    • PR

Yes, real PageRank (PR), the kind that only Google knows about plays a very large part in websites showing up (or not) for search queries that are relevant to it. But toolbar PageRank is another matter entirely. What you see there doesn't correlate very well to where your page will show up in the search results.

See: "Getting Into Google" (Scroll down to the "Google Still Loves Its PageRank" part.)

    • The number of incoming links

Not so much in and of itself. Real PR, as mentioned above, is calculated not only on the number of links, but also on the quality of those links. A handful of links from authoritative, trustworthy, relevant pages should far outweigh hundreds of links from so-so sites.

See the High Rankings Link Building Forum.

    • Keyword density

Not in that there's some special percentage that you need to aim for. Certainly it's helpful to have the keyword phrases that you'd like to show up being used within the content of your page. But that's just common sense, if you ask me. Surely, if your page is about a certain something (your keyword phrase), how could that phrase NOT be on the page?

See the various threads on keyword density on the High Rankings Forum.

• Page response time

This is important only because if it takes too long to load, it might not be properly (or completely) indexed.

    • Bounce rate

It's doubtful that this matters, because there's no way for Google to know the bounce rate of every site. And it wouldn't be fair for them to only count the bounce rates of those sites that have Google Analytics installed, so my guess is that this is not a factor.

See various High Rankings forum threads.

    • Time on site

Like the above answer, they don't know this number unless the site has Google Analytics installed. That said, they may sometimes incorporate the old trick of seeing if a searcher clicks to another site in the search results after clicking one result, and how long it took them to click another. In other words, if they find that lots of people who clicked to one site in the search engine results pages (SERPs) always end up back at Google to try another site, then perhaps that first site wasn't a great answer to the search query after all.

    • Domain page / Page age

From what I can tell, this can often be a factor. But it doesn't seem to be as prominent a factor as it was a few years ago.

3. Is there any special technique for content writing?

There's no special technique, but I highly suggest hiring a professional marketing copywriter. You will see a positive return on your investment very quickly if you do. In addition, the tried and true SEO copyediting techniques in my "Nitty-gritty of Writing for Search Engines" may come in handy if you're not sure how to integrate your keyword phrases into your professionally written content.  

4. Should we cater to code-to-text ratio while developing websites?

There's not one shred of evidence that this would have an effect on where a page would show up in the search results for a relevant search query.

5. If active scripting is a must for webpage development, how harmful can it be for PageRank and positions?

It's typically not harmful at all because it's usually done before a browser (or search engine spider) sees a page. To users and search engines, your dynamically generated pages are just static HTML by the time they get to them. Still, not all dynamically generated pages are created equal. There are some ways of developing your site that are less search friendly than others. For example, some JavaScript menus, some AJAX, etc.

See "Diagnosing the SEO Health of Your Website".

6. If a webpage is ranking top for a specific keyword, if we make textual changes in that webpage, is there any chance that we lose the rankings?

Any changes you make to a page's content can affect how relevant the search engines believe it to be for any particular search query. That doesn't mean it definitely will change the search results, but it could. The only way to know is to try it and see. Usually, if you're rewriting your page to be more useful to your site visitors and you don't remove all the instances of the keyword phrase, you should be fine. Because nothing is permanent with SEO, if you don't like what you see you can tweak it until you do.

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Link Building Tips

Find Relevant Links

The first thing you must do when you begin your quest to build links to your website is find relevant websites that will link to you.

How I classify a relevant link is this: the page where your link will appear either mentions your keyword or a synonym to that keyword.

As of right now, it does not appear that Google, Yahoo and MSN are using relevancy in their ranking algorithms but, trust me, they soon will.

So why not start preparing for the coming changes now? Then when the changes are made, you will be ahead of everyone else – and your rankings will show it!

Here are some more reasons to start building relevant links now:
1. You may actually receive traffic from those links if they are related to the theme of the site they are on.
2. In the future, these links will be viewed by the search engines as more valuable and will make your web pages appear more relevant for your target search terms.

Anchor Text Variety

Non Natural Anchor Text

The anchor text is the readable portion of the text that is usually underlined and in blue. Here is the html:
Job Search

The portion that says “Golf Clubs” is the anchor text. This is important because this anchor text is how the search engines determine relevance for search terms. So if I want to rank for “Golf Clubs,” I would need to obtain some links with this in the anchor text.

Now this is where some people get carried away and shoot themselves in the foot.
You see, many people go out and get 1,000 links all with the exact same anchor text. The problem is that this would not occur naturally. If you were to analyze the backlinks for some of your competitors, I am sure you would find that their backlink anchor text is not 100% pure.

They might have “click here” or “http://jobsadvisor.instantspot.com/blog”, etc. It looks very suspicious to the search engines if your anchor text is all exactly the same.

Natural Anchor Text Linking

In order to appear natural you need to ensure you build links using a variety of anchor text. Don’t be afraid to junk up your anchor text a bit. You may find it actually helps you in your rankings ☺
I would recommend you use your top target keywords as anchor text using some variations with other keyword phrases. Also, throw in some “click here” and some “www.mydomain.com” … this will ensure your links look natural.

In fact, you should come up with a list of anchor text variations that you can rotate through for each of your site’s pages. This will ensure your link portfolio looks as natural as possible to the search engines.

Deep Linking

Non Natural Inbound Linking (100% of the links go to the home page)
This is an important tip and could be the difference between success and failure of your newly launched site(s).

Deep links are links to internal pages of your website. Most people will aggressively build links only to their homepage … but this is definitely not the most natural looking linking profile.
Instead, I would recommend you split you inbound links between your home page and your internal pages.
You should still have about 50% or so of the links point to the homepage, but spread the other links out across your other pages.

Natural Inbound Linking

This has a couple of benefits.
• This will result in your site getting deeply spidered which in turn will cause the search engines to find and index more pages faster.
• You will also start to notice that your internal pages will begin to rank better for their target keywords.
• I believe if you do this on newly launched sites you can keep yourself out of the “Google sandbox.”

Unique IP Addresses

Non Natural Linking from single IP address

Every website is assigned to an IP address. An IP address can also be thought of as the equivalent of a street address or a phone number for a computer or other network device on the Internet.

Just as each street address and phone number uniquely identifies a building or telephone, an IP address can uniquely identify a specific server or a website.
Here is an example IP Address:

123.456.789.000
A Block: 123
B Block: 456
C Block: 789
D Block: 000

Natural Linking from various IP Addresses
When building your links you want to ensure you get links from a variety of IP sources, this will ensure you have the most natural looking backlink portfolio.

This may sound like a simple tip, but getting site wide links from a high PR website is not a good idea for this reason. You may get 1,000’s of links, but they are all from the same IP and will in short order hurt your rankings instead of improve them. This of course is mostly in Google, MSN may still give you some love.

Link Building Velocity

One of the things that I learned from reading the Google Patent is that Google pays attention to the speed at which you aquire your links.

This is why it is highly recommended that you build your links slowly and at a consistent velocity, or speed. The reason to do this is because a site that is naturally popular will consistently gain new links just from people wanting to share what they have found.

In order to duplicate this, we must resist what can be a very strong urge to acquire as many links as we can as fast as we can.

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