Google Optimization - Key Factors

I just stumbled upon a post on Kassper´s blog about key factors on Google optimization.
He lists up 8 factors, that are highly important when it comes to optimize your blog for a better ranking on search engines. Here they are:

1. make sure your new pages link to your old ones
2. add a sitemap to your blog
3. use title optimization
4. use relevant keywords in your posts
5. submit your site to web-directories
6. use robots.txt files to prevent non-relevant content being scanned
7. submit your site to Google
8. write content for your readers - not for search engines

I agree with most of them but I want to go a little deeper into these.

Make sure your new pages link to your old ones
Links are what you need for a high ranking in search engines. They are the veins of the Internet. When your blog grows bigger and bigger, there will be a large number of posts on it maybe hundreds of them. Don´t let them disppear. While writing a new blog post, chances are you will talk about a topic, you have talked about in an earlier post. Put a link to your older post then.
This keeps your readers sticked to your blog as they find even more information about the topic they are interested in and therefore reading your new post.
Don´t let them go away without showing them ways to get deeper into that topic. I put up some links to older posts here in this one, you will see them while you read one. Just follow those links to get deeper inside.
Installing an internal linking structure on your blog can really help you with your search engine rankings.

Add a sitemap to your blog
Especially when you are using WordPress, installing sitemaps for your blog is very easy. Remember to install an XML-Sitemap for the search engines, plus an HTML-Sitemap for your readers to help both of them to access all pages of your site easily.
There are plugins for WordPress for both type of sitemaps. I made a list of must-have plugins earlier, don´t miss it.

Use title optimization
I have already written an article about relevant homepage titles, so just go ahead if you want to read more about this. As the title of your pages will be a very important factor for your search engine ranking you are strongly recommended to keep an eye on this.

Use relevant keywords in your posts
Where would you pages go without having keywords on it? Try to use keywords from the long tail as well.

Submit your site to web-directories
Though there are some directories on the Internet, I would recommend submitting your website to, with 99.9% of directories out there, you will end up wasting your time. Why? Just look, where your site will be listed within the directory. In most cases, this will be on a page like this: www.directory.tld/category/sub-category/page/54/. How many people do you think would browse through all of this just to find the link to your site? Feel lucky, if you notice more than one visitor from there.

Oh, you need links to raise the PageRank of your site? Take a second look at the URL above. There are directories with a PR 6 or PR 5 or something available - some are even free to submit to - but go away from the directory´s homepage, go right onto the page, where your link will be placed and check the PR of that one page. Guess what? Again 99.9% of them will have… Right: PR 0 or even NO PR.

Use robots.txt files to prevent non-relevant content being scanned
Not only does a robots.txt-File help you with preventing search engines from indexing content you don´t want to appear in search results, especially in WordPress there is some danger of creating duplicate content because WordPress tends to make your content available via different URLs. Right after publishing this article - as long as there is no newer article being posted - you´d be able to read it by using several URLs. You could just visit my homepage - it will appear first as long it is the newest article. You could visit this article directly, or visit the October 2007 archive or you could visit the SEO category on my blog.

With some tweaks within WordPress and by using a robots.txt-File you can prevent search engines from finding all these different URLs showing up the same article.

Submit your site to Google
I don´t agree with this one. It is not necessary to use Google´s form to submit a new site to them. First, it does not show any effect - I have submitted new sites using this form and there is no evidence, that their crawler even comes visiting that new site. Getting indexed by Google can be achieved much faster by getting links to your site from other sites that are being crawled regularly.
I succeeded in getting a new site indexed by Google within 24 hours by doing nothing more, than putting up 2 links to it on sites I know being crawled every day.

Write content for your readers - not for search engines
As I have announced a few day ago, I have been invited to be a guest blogger over at canimakebigmoneyonline.com and I have written an article about Mistakes in Internet Marketing there, which covers the difference between writing for search engines and writing for your readers. (I will put up the link to the article here, as soon as it has been published).

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google, seo, sitemap, title optimization, keywords, directories, robots.txt, content

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