The Truth about ‘Getting to the Top of Google’ Scams

Here are some examples.

Dear Friend,
We have analyzed your website and see you are not coming up for important keywords. Please see the attached report. We can promise you top ranking in Google.

Dear Business Owner,
Let us submit you to thousands of search engines in the U.S. and overseas and get you top ranking on Google.

GUARANTEED TOP POSITION ON GOOGLE!
Let the power of *Yellow-P-(insert your state here) get your business found for more leads today!

NOTE: Be aware of any company contacting you with Yellow in their name. Since the real Yellow Pages had not copywrited their “finger's do the walking” there are hundreds of same-sounding, same-looking spinoffs hitch hiking on their branding.

Let's be crystal clear about this point.

NO ONE can guarantee website rankings in Google, Yahoo or Bing. PERIOD. If you dig and do a little research you’ll find specific information on the corporate websites of the big 3 saying absolutely no one can guarantee ranking or position on search engines.

Before you read any further I invite you to conduct a live test for yourself to validate that I really know how search engines work; that I have real world experience with search engine optimization, especially with Google.

I set out to have my company appear well in Google for regional and local searches relating to web design in Virginia. Let's take a look at my regional position. From the Google search box try various phrases such as:

Virginia Web Design Companies
Web Designers Virginia
Web development firms Virginia
Web Design firms in Virginia
and so on...

If you are finding my company at the top (see my bio below for my domain -company name information ) then maybe you might be interested in what I have to tell you about ranking well on search engines.

The next obvious question you might ask is; “How can I legitimately get better ranking for my website”. The answer is simple -- become a proactive website owner. The days of building a website and having legions of customers knocking down your door are gone.

Some businesses have turned to advertising on large directory websites or sponsored links campaigns. The problem is when you stop paying for your links or listing your web presence goes away.

I am going to outline the most basic components for helping raise your website organically in search engines; things you can do yourself or pay someone else to do for you.

There are 4 primary components to a high-ranking website. Sure, there are hundreds of other factors, but these 4 are tasks that you may perform yourself providing you have complete access and ownership for your website.

Age of the website domain name
Title and description meta tags
Amount of web site pages
Back links

Age of the website domain name
Even though you cannot add years to your domain name you should take care to keep up your domain registration and never let your registration lapse. Older websites that have been around for awhile obtain a little more attention from Google. When Google crawls a website year after year this tells Google that this site is going to be around for a while! This is why some business owners purchase as their website name old domain names that have become available. There is a big reseller market for domain names.

*Note: Pointing multiple domain names to your website does not help you rank better.

Title and description meta tags
Meta tags are the main markers in your website that tell Google *bots and other search engine robots what your website is about.

*Bots are software that crawl the World Wide Web collecting and cataloguing information posted on the Web.

Your website meta tags should be unique in explaining what any web page in your website is about. For example, if your website is about selling 'deep sea custom fishing rods' then a good title and description tag for your website would look like this:

Title tag: Buy Deep Sea Custom Fishing Rods Online
Description tag: Custom deep sea rods made to order. Buy the best deep sea fishing rods online. Custom rods for ocean fishing, big fish and trophy fishing.

Every signal page in your website is an opportunity to tell Google what you are about. If you have 10 web pages, then you have 10 opportunities to tell Google what you are about, how to find you and so on.

Amount of website pages
As mentioned above I have stated that, 'Every signal page in your website is an opportunity to tell Google what you are about.'

Therefore, the more pages you have, the more opportunities you have for getting found in Google. Think of Google as a huge digital library of information and every website in the Google library is a digital book. How many pages are in your web-book? Is your website the thickness of a comic book or do you have a page count equal to War & Peace?

Try this small exercise that will show you the amount of pages found for any individual website. In the Google search box type this:

site:www.somedomainname.com ( insert your website or another )

This will show you the names and the amount of pages that Google has stored in its database for that website. This is a good way to see how your competitors are doing and what they have used for the title and description tags for their webpages.

Still not sure what I am talking about?

It's all there for you to see. Take a look at the illustration below after entering site:www.steelmasterusa.com.

Google shows ( Results 1 - 10 of about 217 from www.steelmasterusa.com. (0.16 seconds)

Now look at the listing.
The blue text is the Title tag and the smaller black text beneath is the description tag. If you move through all the Google results you will see that all the title and description tags are different and unique. And there are lots of pages for Google to crawl and store in its index.

So how do you build or create more pages?

Write articles, post case studies and pour out all the great information that is between your ears onto the web.

A few years ago I started taking excerpts of my emails and my responses as articles - then place then on my website.

This serves 4 important purposes.

1) HAVING MORE CONTENT ON MY WEBSITE GETS ME GREAT GOOGLE RANKING.

2) THE ARTICLES BECOME A GREAT-TIME SAVING TOOL. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS SEND A CLIENT A LINK WHEN THEY ARE ASKING A QUESTION FOR SOMETHING I HAVE ALREADY WRITTEN ABOUT.

3) WHEN OTHER PEOPLE STUMBLE ACROSS MY ARTICLES I AM PRECEIVED AS AN AUTORITATIVE SOURCE, AN EXPERT.

4) I CAN REPOST MY ARTICLES ON OTHER ARTICLE REPOSITORY WEBSITES FOR ADDITIONAL EXPOSURE FOR * BACK LINKS.

Here is where I deposit my articles:
http://www.visionefx.net/articles/index.html

I am planning to start posting video responses later this year too... but I haven't pulled the trigger on that one yet.
To recap, the more pages you have the better chance your website is going to rank better or at least get found for more searches over Google.

Back links
What the heck is a *back link you ask?
Think of it as a vote.
Did you know that in the early years of 1994 Google was called Back Rub? See: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

It's not hard to understand, but more difficult to make it happen.

If I put a link on my website for you - then I am voting for you. I am saying that I think you have an important website. A back link is also more valuable if your website has related information.

To put it another way, if Yahoo put a link to your website on its home page then that would be a really powerful back link that would propel you to the top of the search engines. This would mean more to you versus having 100,000 no-name websites all linking to you.

Note: Do not link to other websites unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Outside links on your website only present an opportunity for people to leave your website, so do not link unless there is some value in doing this for your website visitors.

How do you get back links?

Build your own. Did you know that a link or listing or mention (with link) in a Directory, Blog, Social Network, Press Release, Article site, Ecommerce Application, Video site, Power Points, PDF, Text files or Word docs. are considered back links?

Sometimes back links happen naturally. If your website contains lots of information, or is a popular or at least useful website, then people will end up linking to you.

At the end of the day, it's not about the amount of back links you have, but the quality of the websites who are linking to your website.

Stay away from the spammers and the hucksters who promise great rankings. Getting great rankings and improved exposure for your website over search engines does not happen over night. It takes time, hard work and dedication.

At the end of the day, if you want to generate sales leads and brand awareness through your website, you must become a proactive webmaster or hire someone to be your proactive webmaster.

About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States. Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or www.visionefx.net.