This article started off as a simple premise, I would use the experience I had gained while at InsWeb to write an article describing the ins and outs of trying to push a site to the top of Google’s organic search engine rankings. This of course was to be an example based on pushing the InsWeb site to the top of the charts, but now that I no longer work there this presents a bit of a challenge. So I switched angles and thought, why not work towards pushing my own site to the top of the rankings, or at least as far as I could… So here goes.
The biggest trick to search engine optimization (SEO), is just that, it’s not a trick. There are no secret ingredients to get you site to number one, you have to earn it. You see search engine ranking through Google is all about how good the world wide web thinks your site is, not Google. The more links you have to your site the better your rank. More specifically, the more good sites that link to your site the better. Many people try to build multiple sites that all link to one main site in order to gain link popularity with search engines. This is referred to as link farming, like planting links like little weeds all over the internet. Google hates that, because its misleading. These aren’t real sites, they’re little puppet sites all for the purpose of pushing the main site up in ranking. This is the perfect illustration of what organic search is all about, real content, real sites, real information, not marketing tricks.
For example, if you were a consumer looking for information about the latest mp3 player, or even SEO techniques and some bozo had built an army of sites all set up to trick search engines directing you to V1-a6ra over the internet, or the most amazing stock market deal in the history of wall street, you’d be pretty mad. Well Google tried to think of these tricks and developed their search engine to weed these false sites out of the results. The spammers keep coming up with new tricks and Google and others keep culling them out.
So what’s a legitimate site to do? Write content, build a better product, create an experience that you can’t get anywhere else in the blogosphere. As they say, if you build it they will come.
So here you are, and here I am. I built the site. I submitted it to Google to be indexed. I’ve tried to update the content periodically. I’ve built it using CSS, and less code to help the search engines digest the content, like a low-fat tofu burger (ya gotta have cheese right). I built an xml site map and sent it off to Google. I added Google analytics to track my progress. And here are the results…Doodley-squat. Why? Because at this point I only have a couple links to my site so I can’t generate much in terms of ranking. No links, no rank. It’s that simple. So I will continue to add content, and hopefully over time I’ll generate interest in my ideas, and gradually move up the ranks for the search term doodley-squat, and all will be right in the world.
Now that I have my blog up i thought I would add a bit to this article…I’m #2 on Google for “Joel Cory”. Finally! There is another Joel Cory that is a voice over actor for video games, so he’s listed on IMDB and a bunch of other sites…and I bumped his #2 spot and nudged my way in. Yeah.
