Many people will do anything do get on Google’s first result page. That’s why some webmasters regularly come up with new spam methods to get on Google’s first result page.

Phillip Lenssen recently reported two new methods that might be used by some people to get top 10 listings on Google.

Spam trick 1: Get higher rankings in Google’s local results

It seems to help if the address of a business is close to the city center or the main station. If a business gets a post box close to these locations and submits that address to Google Maps, it will be listed higher in the local results on Google.

As the local results are usually displayed above the regular listings in Google, this could be a way to get many clicks.

Spam trick 2: Get higher rankings in Google’s regular results

This trick is somewhat hard to believe. It seems that some webmasters hire cheap Chinese workers to get higher rankings on Google. As strange as it sounds, these webmasters pay couriers on bikes to drive to various Internet cafes, search for their keywords and then click on the listing of the webmaster’s site.

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There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

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Link building is generally a term used around the SEO industry to describe building relevant links to a website in an effort to rank that site for specific terms while also building trust, value and equity to that website. All too often however, link building is associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. As an old school online marketer and PR guy, I tend to take a different approach to my link building philosophy, and see link building as more of a branding and web presence approach.

That’s sound advice and it is particularly appropriate for Google, since Google puts a great deal of weight on links. Bing and Yahoo seem to value them slightly less and of course their share of search is also very much less.

Many A Mickle Does Not Make A Muckle

The old Scottish saying would confirm that if you add sufficient small things, it can add up to something substantial. However it may well be with the Google search algorithms the down-weighting of spam-type links is so severe that there is no SEO benefit by creating them. There are a wide variety of spam-type links including illogical reciprocal links and links from dubious websites. In the worst case such links might even lead to penalties, if the website is deemed to have breached the Google Quality Guidelines. As Baker points out even links that appear on a site-wide basis in sidebars or footers may well be also very much devalued.

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If you want to get high rankings on Google and be more SEO friendly, it is necessary that many other websites link to your website. This is something that most webmasters know. What many webmasters still don’t know is that a website that has only a few inbound links can outrank a website that has many inbound links.

Why many backlinks alone are not enough

If a website has a high number of inbound links, it does not automatically rank highly for any keyword.

Google specifies the position of a website in its search results by on-page factors and off-page factors. On-page factors are all factors that can be found on your web pages:

* Did you optimize the web page for the targeted keyword?
* Can search engines find all pages of your website through the links on your website?
* Is the HTML code of your web pages error free so that search engine spiders can easily parse your pages?
* Does your robots.txt file allow search engine spiders to visit your web pages?
* Are your web pages free of all spam elements (no hidden text, no sneaky redirects, no keyword stuffing, cloaking, etc.?

Off-page factors are the factors that cannot be found on your web pages:

* How many websites link to your site?
* Are these links from related high quality pages?
* Do social bookmark websites link to your site?
* Do the links to your website include the keywords for which you want to be ranked highly?

All of these factors are important if you want to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

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