You’re at the stage where you site has great content, it’s relevant to your industry and you are “writing for people and optimizing for search engines”, but for some reason you are still not getting the traffic you want and need to grow your business and your identity on the web.

You are most likely in one of two positions.

1) Your keywords are strong, well structured and definitely relevant, but you do not have the exposure to be known yet. This could be to age of domain, lack of back links or simply that your competitors are throwing more resources at the problem and are simply beating you.

2) You feature well on search engines, just where you want to be, on the first page but you are not getting the traffic you expected. Could it be that your keywords are not quite right?

The solutions to both are pretty much the same, a continued SEO strategy.

With a comprehensive plan of attack, you need to increase your exposure and spend less time doing it.

What’s the use of being able to see yourself on Google’s first page if no one is actually searching by those keywords?

It’s like having a site that sells car parts but your sites major keyword result is “new chevrolet model”. It fits, but it doesn’t fit – you’re not getting the clicks because the searcher can tell straight away that you are not who they are looking for.

You might know the best way to get to your site, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is using that method. There may be a big difference between “2010 chevrolet” and “new chevrolet”.

Get it all right from the beginning, focus on descriptions, focus on keywords and draw up a real plan.

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Here is an interesting tidbit from outspokenmedia.com

High level view of Google’s algorithm

* Trust authority of host domain – 25 percent
* Link population of specific page – 22 percent
* Anchor text of external links – 20 percent
* On page keyword use – 15 percent
* Traffic and CTR data – 7 percent
* Social graph metrics – 6 percent
* Hosting and registration – 5 percent

I haven’t seen any raw data supporting these claims, but they do they make sense. The most important things for me are the apparently low keyword number and the high trust authority number.

The anchor text of external links is very important, this dictates your phrase. You must be consistent and your links must be relevant. Staying away from black hat techniques and fighting for respected back links rather than random ones is what will set you apart from your competitors.

If you want to know more about the actual Google Algorithm and it’s history, look no further than the Stanford paper written by the Google founders.

Back in the day before the web exploded to what we know it as now, the whole arena was a little mysterious.

HTML developers were getting paid a ton of money to build websites for every business out there and they were looking for ways to get to the top of search engine results, much like they still are today.

Things have changed, web development doesn’t pay as well as a career anymore and the web is even more complicated.

But, everyone still wants to be on the top of a search engine result page.

Within HTML code there is a section with the “head” tags that deals with META data. That is data that the human reader does not see, or care about.

It may contain information about the character set being used, a description of the website etc..

There’s still one tag widely used.. “Keywords”. Even before Google, web search engines used crawlers and spiders and whatever else you want to call the software they use to interrogate every web-page they could find. Their intentions were very good, to build up a list of as many pages as they could to give their customers accurate results.

They relied a lot on the keywords of a site to do this, because if you are selling a product online you are surely only going to use the keywords that are relevant to your site? Of course not, people found out instantly that they could beat the system by using too many keywords or keywords that were not relevant. – An honor system the web is not.

To this end, keywords are largely ignored now as search engines have a lot more information available to them.

But don’t forget the description tag! This is as important as the title of your page.

Keywords out, description in.

Write for people, optimize for search engines.

Many people wonder about what Google’s PageRank really is.

How does it work? What are the formulaes to calcualte it?

And most importantly, how do I increase my own PageRank?

To start, there is a great guide on Page Rank at googleguide.com

From Google themselves:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

It get’s way more complicated, and there are many theories as to how Google actually calculates your PageRank, but in short the higher your rank the better for you on Google search.

Now remember one thing, the PageRank number that you see in the Google toolbar (from 1 – 10) is really only good for one thing – buying/selling links. It is a number that you can use to benchmark with others when trading links.

Concentrate on understanding the google algorithm/a> and focus your time on your SEO strategies.

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