1.      Keywords and text matching

Google gives a lot of weight to the title tag when searching for keywords. So make sure your most important keywords or keyphrases appear in the title tag. It seems to work best if you have other words in your title tag, too, after your keywords, but try to remain under 35-40 characters.

Google does not use meta tags such as keywords or description tags. This is because the text in these tags cannot be seen by visitors to a website. And Google feels these tags will be abused, by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words in them in order the get more visitors.

The lack of support for meta tags means that Google creates your description from the first few lines of text on your page. The spider reads information from left to right in columns, like we read a newspaper, so placing your keyword phrases early in the body text of pages in your site is very beneficial.

Google considers keyword density in the body of a page for determining relevancy too, so make sure your keywords and phrases appear a couple of times throughout the whole page. Don't go overboard though, a density of 6-10% seems to work best. Well written sentences that are topically focused are the best spider food for Google since it has become wary of words that "float" on a page without supporting words to provide context.

One final tip on page relevancy is having your keywords and phrases in links which point to your site. It is a good idea to have the linking text contain your keywords as Google itself says that it analyzes pages links come from.

2.      The Pagerank™ system

Google Page Rank (or PR as it is often referred to) is simply an indication of the number of websites that link to a specific website. It also attempts to indicate the quality of those links. PR ranges from 0 to 10 (with 10 being the 'best' PR and 0 being the 'worst'). The vast majority of small business websites will usually find they have a PR of between 0 and 5.

It works on the basis that if your website has been linked from another website, yours must have some good content and therefore Google will count the link as a vote. You can check your link popularity on Google by downloading the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com.

But Google does not simply count the number of incoming links a page has. In Google's own words:

"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."

So the very best links, in Google's eyes, come from "authority sites". An authority site is one that is very well established and respected such as mainstream news sites (CNN, TIME, NY Times, etc) other search directories, industrial leaders (Macromedia, HP, Nike, etc), and other highly credible sources such as a regional real estate bureau. While a website doesn't necessarily have to represent a large corporation to be considered an authority site, the sheer number of pages and references, combined with high visitor numbers generally associated with large corporate sites helps. Some smaller companies and alternative news sources/blogs have also enjoyed "authority" status. This status is, in some ways, flexible and situational. A link from the Real Estate bureau mentioned above will not tend to help a business outside of its region unless a tangible relevancy factor is somehow introduced.

Google Pagerank system also takes into account the number of links the page that has linked to you has. The reasoning for this is that a page X has a certain amount of voting PR and if your site Y is the only link from that page X, then Google feels confident that page X thinks your page Y is the best link it has, and will give you more PR. If however page X has 50 links, page X could think your only the 50th best page. So the more links it has the less of a PR boost your site gets.

The algorithm is fairly complicated so all you need to remember is that the name of the game is to get as many links from pages with high PR and few other links. The more of these links you get the more your PR will grow and the more your rankings will improve for your relevant keywords.

The best way to get links is to submit your site to directories (especially Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart).

To recap:

·         Have your main keywords and phrases in your TITLE tag and well spread throughout your page.

·         Get as many links from as many high PR, low number of outbound links pages you can.

·         GET LISTED IN DMOZ.ORG, Yahoo and Looksmart.