Quality over Quantity.
August 25 2009
Everybody wants their website to rank highly in Google. The higher SERP you have, the more exposure you get, which equals more visitors who should translate into more customers.
We all know about keywords and their impact on achieving a higher SERP placement. If the word or phrase you are trying to rank with is a competitive one then this is where quality comes in. It doesn’t matter how many times your keyword of phrase appears on a page, Google has moved on from there. It got wise quite quickly to keyword stuffing, Alt text and all the other black hat tricks that webmaster were employing to get ranked higher.
Now the overall quality of the site is judged. Both by how often the site is updated, and how many inbound links there are. Those links are then in turn judged on how relevant to the site content they are and ranked accordingly.
If you want to give your site the best start possible there are a few things you can do.
Write a good page title between the tags for each page. It should accurately describe what’s going on each particular page.
Try and create new content each week. If you or the site owner can’t do that, get someone to do it for you. Continually evolving sites, with value being added regularly appear much higher on SERPs. Make the new contact good quality content, while wanting to appeal to a robot, your site also needs to appeal to human traffic.
Link to good quality relevant sites, and try and get reciprocal links back from them. Each relevant link to you is counted as a “vote” by Google. Every single one will count in getting the site higher.
Lastly, don’t be tempted to trick Google into placing you at the top. They employ teams of very, very clever people to program out as many tricks as possible. They also have a policy of “blacklisting” sites they think are trying to play the system. If you want to use Google, play by its rules. There are still plenty of legitimate ways of getting what you want.
The main thing to remember when designing a site to rank well is quality. Ignore the SERPs and concentrate on creating a useful, useable site with quality content. The quality is the element that will make it a success or not. It’s like businesses who concentrate on good customer service instead of the bottom line. Look after the customers, create a pleasing experience for them and the money will follow.
Thinking like Google for a moment. If you were a multi-billion dollar business whose reputation and profit came adverts shown with search engine results, would you want to be known for showing quality websites that fulfil the search criteria, or for returning sites that knew all the tricks? The reason Google works so well is because you get what you search for. If that changed and all of a sudden your search just returned amateur sites that you didn’t want, you would stop using it.
The key to a good SERP position is quality, not quantity.
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