Many times a client only looks at the bottom line when it comes to the performance they are getting for their investment into Search Engine Marketing.

They often only look at the selected keyword phrases that they are paying for, without fully realizing what other residual effects they are receiving.

When a site gets properly optimized, (SEO) it is being transformed into a thought-out navigational pattern to information. This is the same pattern a search engine spider looks for. Don’t forget, the easier you make it for a spider to index your site, the better your chances are for getting your site a higher placement in the search engine results page (SERP’s).

While W3C validation is something all sites should strive for, it is not required for better rankings. Does it help? Probably. Yahoo engineers have stated that whether a site is W3C compliant or not makes no difference to how it ranks. If it has relevant content, it will get ranked.

Another element when optimizing a site is that through proper naming of page titles, file names and placement of content make the site all the more relevant to the spider. Although Google places less value on Meta Tags, they are still used as part of the algorithm, and should not be overlooked.

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You probably know Google’s informal company motto “Don’t be evil”. Google is a very successful company that knows a lot about its advertisers and users. In addition, Google has a market share that would allow them do certain things.

What could Google do if they were evil? Note that the following is only hypothetical:

Google could favor its own products and websites

Google could prefer websites from its own services in the search results: websites that run Google ads, websites that use Google’s payment service, Blogger sites, Google Base, etc.

All websites that pay Google in some way could be preferred in the search results while others are downranked.

Google could punish websites at discretion

If Google doesn’t like your website or if someone tells Google that you’re a bad boy then Google can ban your website from the search results without any reason given so it’s so bad for your SEO result.

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Link building is one of the hardest and one of the most important things that you have to do if you want to get high rankings on Google. As it takes so much time to get inbound links, it is very important to make sure that the links to your website contain the right keywords.

The basics about keywords in text links and link bombs

Google tries to find a relation between the words that are used to link to your site and the content of your website. If many websites link to your website with the word “tomatoes” then Google’s algorithm will come to the conclusion that your website should be listed in the search results for the keyword “tomatoes”.

The keywords in the links to a website have been so important for your SEO and Google that people managed to get websites to the top of Google’s search results for very obscure keywords. For example, some people started a scheme in which they asked their friends to link to the official website of George W. Bush with the keyword “miserable failure”.

The result was that George W. Bush’s website was #1 on Google for that keyword. In the meantime, Google has learned to deal with these so-called Google bombs and it’s not as easy to manipulate the results with the links as it has been.

What you should do if your website has no links

When you try to get links from other websites, you should make sure that they help you to increase your rankings for your keywords. That means that you must make sure that the links to your website contain your keywords.

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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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