I’ve been reading a blog by a New York chap who gives some tips on search engine optimisation.
Seems there’s a lot of confusion about why the various search spiders re-index certain pages and not others, but it seems value of content is still an important factor. One suggestion is that if visitors spend a long time on a page it must have some value and therefore moves up the scale, so to speak.
I wonder whether that means you can stare at your own pages for 10 minutes at a time and see them move up the charts!
I rather suspect not.
Naturally there is no end of experts ready to take your money and promise you top positiong with Google – even though in reality that’s impossible. I get several calls a week from call centre staff who assure me most vehemently that they can give me the number 1 slot and I’ll keep it whilever I’m paying them a consultancy fee. If only it were that simple. We’d all be in the top slot, wouldn’t we? Hang on, that can’t be possible, can it? There’s only 1 top slot. So all but one of the companies that promises me the coveted position must be lying.
If only I knew which one was telling the truth…
From my experience (which isn’t great), the way to get good ranking on search engines is still lots of links! I’ve found having links back to people who link to me and the referrers works well. A lot of this can be automated with various plugins for wordpress. Registering for linking services such britblogs and web-rings also helps – people do stumble across sites from those (I’m pretty sure that’s how I started reading this site!) and every additional reader can produce another set of links, pushing the ranking higher. I’ve also found that Technorati helps in this…
Content is still king though – if you’ve got nothing that people want to read then any amount of linking won’t help
I’ve also found a couple of interesting guides on improving linking and search engine ranks, a lot of it is self-evident, but it’s worth having a look through some to get ideas!
Thanks for the input, Paul.
I guess it would be nice if there were some easy way to do this, but honestly, isn’t anything worth doing in life worth putting in a little effort?
Somehow, my name has ended up on some mailing list where I get regular offers of making a fortune the ‘easy’ way, which is, invariably, to send the author a small amount even though they don’t actually need it. It’s to show my ‘commitment’.
And Santa’s coming to visit me Dec. 25th, too.
I’m interested in the point you make about linking back to people who link to you. I must check out why that helps.
I’ve been wondering about that myself! I think in the first instance just linking to people can have some effect – my blog is now linked to from people I’ve never dealt with just because they display incoming links on the page rather than just point back to Technorati (a trick I’ve also picked up on, now if only I could get them to properly index my blog!). There seems to be something peculiar about the way that Google (in particular) deals with these, which gives additional benefit – it’s possibly just a slightly weighted score is given to two-way links.
I suspect there’s a case for SEO when there’s money to be made, but for most of us it’s common sense and about “networking” – represented by who we link to and who links to us.