@Paul – directory links in general are adding less value over time IMO. Directory submission should simply be outsourced and then forget about it. You may find some decent directories, but these are few and far between.

@Tim – hope it helped.

Thanks for commenting. This is an old post, but when I recently took a look to update it I actually decided virtually all of this still applies. Funny how little has changed in past 3 years – if anything these things are actually more important now than they were then.

Rgds
Richard

Glad you found it useful, and I agree that not a whole lot has changed. I think social bookmarking can be useful for discovery, but basically any cheap manual “service” you can buy from developing countries is unlikely to have much value due to the shear amount of spam you get. The main changes since I wrote this are perhaps related to flash and quality of links required to rank well.

I must rewrite this sometime actually. Thanks for dropping by.
Rgds
Richard

Unfortunately it didn’t answer my question, but many more in it’s place! The top 10 although a few years old now, still seems very relevant today. The only major addition would be perhaps social bookmarking? Would love to hear your thoughts on that topic!

Cheers – Paul

Always worth a read every few months to keep myself inline.

Stuart

A little update: I’m very happy and would like to share this with you all. I created a simple site but with unique content around 1 month ago and following the above guidelines I received my calculated PR today. Guess what? It’s 3!!!:)
Richard – thanks for putting together such relevant information and being such friendly guy!

From grateful reader,
Tim

For those of you who are new to this…follow the 10 steps outlined above and you are on your way to SERP success!

Thanks for dropping by – I’m afraid I haven’t had any experience with that particular platform.

Sorry
Rgds
Richard

Great to hear from you again. How’s everything going over there? Hopefully all good.

This article is a bit dated now – scary to think I wrote this nearly 2 years back… Probably be that a fair bit has changed since also.

Best rgds
Richard

Great article, back to basics is something I think we all can do with reminding ourselfs of, wether you’re an expert or a novice, very useful.

Ken

Thanks for stopping by. This is quite an old article now (it scares me to think I wrote this almost 2 years ago now…)

This article was all about how to get into Google as opposed to how to rank or optimise your search snippets.

I’m not quite understanding your second comment about ‘a[t] least 3 internal links to the same site at your webpage otherwise Google don´t think the website are relevant for the search engine’. I know of many pages that don’t link to any other internal pages and manage to rank quite well. I know Google were thinking of looking at orphan pages carefully to see if they might be parasitic, but not sure they implemented anything on this. I’d also use single-page websites as a good example of pages that don’t link to any other internal pages. Maybe I’ve picked you up wrong?

Best rgds, and again thanks for stopping by and commenting
Richard

What about the title tag – so people want to click at the result i Google and the meta description are also important – that you make the meta description as a sales text.

Also internal linking are important – a least 3 internal links to the same site at your webpage otherwise Google don´t think the website are relevant for the search engine.

Henrik Stenmann
Internet Intelligence House

I do also own the .ie equivalent and redirect to the .com site – don’t know if this helps or hinders things. Probably doesn’t do any harm though.

Frank

The new geo-targeting tool is only available for gTLD – .com, .net, .org etc.

From what I’ve seen the tool can work exceptionally well, but that observation is on a limited set of sites.

If possible I’d still work with ccTLD – go for .ie if your site is focusing on Ireland.

Best rgds
Richard

just wondering about that old issue of Hosting and .IE TLD for sites aimed at the Irish market. There’s an option on Google Webmaster Tools to ‘Set geographic target’ – I wonder how much influence that actually has ?

Thanks, Frank

IMO validation will generally ensure low crawl issues, but apart from that I dont see that valid code will increase rankings.

That search is likely more connected to previous anchors containing relevant fragments of the query. So the googlebomb defusing may only act at a very targeted level. You often see strong changes in rank from related queries when you optimise for short tail phrases.

Rgds
Richard

Also I thought Google killed the bomb ability? What are your thoughts on this:

http://www.google.co.nz/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=who+is+a+failure&spell=1

Really respect your work.

Rgds
Richard

Rgds
Richard

Any tools you could recommend for building a site map?

Also having a problem with mod_rewrite

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055170464

Thanks again for the advice!

You mentioned further up the comments about getting listed in DMOZ as a quick method of getting indexed by Google. This is true and very effective, but increasingly difficult as getting listed in DMOZ these days can take much longer than getting indexed in Google!

Another good option is just to pay to be included in some high authority directories such Yahoo! Directory, Business.com and many others. But hey… it all comes down to your budget.

DMOZ suffered a fairly large data problem late last year. All sites in the queue were lost. You should resubmit your site.

Unfortunately there is no way to find out where your site is in the queue.

Rgds
Richard

My question – is there a way one could find out if DMOZ has rejected your site. I submitted it quite some time ago, October 2006 and still it does not show?

DMOZ is a great link to get, if you can get it. DMOZ was closed to new submissions for many weeks recently, and the wait to get listed has been known to last years.

I don’t think that the DMOZ listing will have a huge effect for competitive SERPs. It wont hurt though

One other thing. Google loves fresh content. If the bot crawls your site and finds nothing new it may determine that your crawl frequency should be reduced. And the opposite also holds – fresh content may well increase your crawl frequency.

That’s the reason why blogs generally index so well – the content is more likely to update than your average static site.

The level of indexing (and updating of cached material) is directly related to a number of factors. But perhaps the most important is your site’s backlink profile. The more high-quality backlinks Google sees the more you will be crawled and indexed. The regularity of new additional links will also help you with this issue.

So in short, try adding regular high-quality links pointing at your content. Then Google should love you a bit more.

Hope this helps.
Rgds
Richard