Building a website that the search engines love can be a bit of a challenge. Everyone wants their website to appear at the first ten results of Google and other major search engines for the keyword or keyword term of their choice. But if there are, say, 100 such websites all competing, how is that even possible?
OK. Let’s stop with the negativity. On the bright side of the coin, it is possible to rank in the top ten for the keyword of your choice. But this depends a lot on the amount of competition you’re up against and a lot of other factors.
Let’s look at some of the factors which help a website rank well in the search engines.
Keyword rich domain name. A keyword rich domain name will stand a better chance of ranking in the search engines than a non-keyword-rich domain name. Let’s say for example, you’re building a website about “Guyana, South America” and your search term of choice is, of course, “guyana, south america.” A domain name such of “guyanasouthamerica.gy” will rank better than “guyanacaribbean.com.” A keyword rich domain name has the keywords you’re targeting inside of the domain name.
Lots of pages with unique, original content. Yes, lots of pages do help a website to gain credibility with the search engines and push it up to the top. Have you ever wondered why wikipedia comes up at the top of search engines so often? Lots of pages! Case close.
Lots of inter-linking. Interlinking, the way the search engines sees it, is a way of providing greater value to your reader. It is also called “internal linking.” Link to other pages within your website, but don’t over do it. For example, you’re writing an article on the benefit of warm water. You can link to another article on the benefits of lemon juice.
A few external links. A few external links to high ranking websites will be interpreted by the search engines as a sign that you really mean to provide value to your readers. However, too many external links will indicate that your site doesn’t have enough content to satisfy its readers and cause it to drop.
Lots of inbound links. The more inbound links you get coming in from other websites on the internet – especially reputable ones, the more your website is seen as an authority site. But get links from blacklisted sites, and your site will go down as well. What are blacklisted sites? They are websites which engaged in fraudulent practices meant to deceive the search engines such as “keyword stuffing,” spamming etc.
So what’s the recipe for building a website that ranks well with the search engine for a keyword of your choice?
Here we go: a keyword rich domain name, unique content, lots of pages, a few outbound links, lots of meaningful inbound links (don’t die trying to get these though) and no black hat techniques. Then build your website in a “genuine, natural manner.”
What are black hat SEO techniques? They’re fraudulent things like these software which offers to create “thousands of back links in minutes.” These will only get your website banned in a short time and blacklisted from many search engines.
Related: Does Google really offer better results than Yahoo!?