Google search engine optimisation

Search engine optimisation or optimization (with a ‘z’ or is that
‘zee’ if your from across ‘the pond’) techniques are constantly
evolving. This evolution is in response to the evolution of
search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google in
particular has come to be seen as the most sophisticated and
advanced search engine as it is armed with an array of anti-spam
technology.

Google’s increasing use of anti-spam features has meant that
optimising websites for Google has become much harder and it’s
now not just a case of opening your websites source files in
notepad, adding some keywords into your various HTML tags,
uploading your files and waiting for the results. In fact in my
opinion and I’m sure others will agree with me, this type of
optimisation, commonly referred to as onpage optimisation will
only ever be 20% effective at achieving rankings for any keywords
which are even mildly competitive. Those of us who aced maths in
school will know this leaves us with 80% unaccounted for.

This 80% corresponds to offpage optimization. Offpage
optimization is all to do with the amount of links pointing to
your site and its pages, the actual linking text (anchor text) of
these links and the quality of the pages which the links are on.
Offpage optimisation is now for sure the overwhelmingly
dominating factor which decides where a site will rank in Google.
That then is what I mean by the 80/20 rule, I’m not talking about
the pareto rule which means that in anything a few (20 percent)
are vital and many (80 percent) are trivial, I’m not sure that
applies to SEO.

What is the logic behind this then, why does Google give so much
‘weight’ (80%) to offpage optimization efforts and so little
(20%) to onpage optimisation. Well simply put it is all about the
quality of their results. Whereas onpage optimisation is
completely controlled by the webmaster and can thus be abused by
an unscrupulous one, offpage optimisation is something that is
not controlled by anyone as such by rather by other webmasters,
websites and indeed the Internet in general. This means that it
is much harder to conduct any underhanded or spammy offpage
optimisation methods in the hope of gaining an unfair advantage
for a website in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages),
this does not mean it is impossible though.

Let’s elaborate for a paragraph or two just why offpage elements
such as incoming links are deemed by Google to be such a good
measure of relevancy, thus making offpage optimisation the most
effective method of optimisation by far. Take the anchor text of
incoming links for instance, if Google sees a link from SITE A to
SITE B with the actual linking text being the words ‘data
recovery london’, then SITE B has just become more relavent and
thus more likely to appear higher in the rankings when someone
searches for ‘data recovery london’. SITE B has no control over
SITE A (in most cases.) and Google knows this. Google can then
look at the link text and say to itself, why would SITE A link to
SITE B with the specific words ‘data recovery london’ if SITE B
wasn’t ‘about’ ‘data recovery london’, there is no answer so
Google must deem SITE B to be ‘about’ ‘data recovery london’.

I said ‘in most cases’ above because often webmasters have
multiple sites and would crosslink them with keyword rich anchor
text, but there is only so many sites and crosslinks any
webmaster can manage, again Google knows this and so as the
number of backlinks and occurrences of keyword rich anchor text
grows (and with that grows the unlikelihood of anything unnatural
like crosslinking going on) so to does the relevancy of the site
which all the backlinks point to. Imagine hundreds or thousands
of sites all linking to a website X with variations of ‘data
recovery london’ type phrases as the linking text, well then
Google can be pretty dam sure that website X is ‘about’ ‘data
recovery london’ and feel confident about returning it in the top
10 results. This is why they place so much importance (80%) on
offpage ranking factors such as links; they are simply the most
reliable way of checking what a site is about and indeed how well
it covers what it is about. This reliance on hard to cheat
offpage factors is what produces the quality search results we
all know, love and use everyday.

The moral of the story from an SEO point of view then is to spend
less time on those little website tweaks which you think might
make a big difference (but won’t) and work hard on what really
counts, what really counts is how the web ’sees’ your website,
the more quality (keyword rich) incoming links your website has
the better the webs ‘view’ will be and therefore the better
Google’s view of your website will be. What Google thinks of your
website is very important, as they ‘look after’ websites which
they like.

Article by David Callan. David is the leading search engine
consultant with AKA Marketing.com’s Search Engine Optimisation
team. AKA Marketing.com provide full SEO services as well as
telephone based consulting for those preferring the DIY approach.

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Ray Burton is a personal training business owner, online writer and growing net entrepreneur. He is also the author of the controversial workout e-book, The Fat 2 Fit Program which is also part of his passive income sources along with the membership site FitterFast.com.

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