Jenn Mears Web Design

This is an article I found today on Lorelle’s amazing Wordpress blog. It’s the perfect answer to that ever-popular question, “How do I get my site to rank high in Google?” I wish there was a “silver bullet answer” to this question too, but it’s a not so much a magic formula as it is a carefully planned campaign.
Lorelle does a great job of explaining the various factors, but in a nutshell, Google bases it’s page ranking system on a combination of the following factors:

Links: Quality over quantity. Don’t go for those “pay for us to link to you” services. Google prefers a few links to your site on well established web sites rather than a ton of links on spam sites.

Domain Age: Spam sites tend to be fly-by-night operations and the longer your site has been around, the better. However, just letting your site sit there on the server isn’t enough. Google also notices the freshness of your site’s content.

Click Through Rate: Google checks on how people find your site and how they get there, whether via a search engine or from a bookmarking site.

Trends, fads and seasons: Keywords have trends too. So you can probably stop typing in “Paris Hilton Video” into your meta-tags now. ;^}

Posting Frequency: Like Alex the Lion says in Madagascar “You know, keep it fresh!”. The more you reward your loyal visitors with useful new information, the more they will visit and recommend your site via incoming links.

Keywords: There are a few areas where it’s really important to place the words that you think people will use to search for your site. Titles, as in the title that shows up at the top of your browser when you view a page, links, headings and tags.

Traffic: How heavily your site is visited, which pages people go to and how long they spend clicking around.

Code: It’s important to keep your site’s code clean and easy to scan through. Hiding your text in a fancy animation or burying important info under tons of scripting makes the engine work harder. I tend to think of code as being like motor oil, the cleaner it is, the smoother your site runs.