Getting a good search ranking in Google has gotten a whole lot harder in recent years. Go back a few years and all you had to do to get your site a high ranking is make a few easy changes to your site.

It was literally as easy as putting some HTML meta tags with key words and a description of your site. Then, making sure your headings were all in h1 tags. The last step was ensuring you mention your keywords on each page. A common trick was putting a huge amount of keywords at the bottom of each page. This is known as “onpage optimisation”.

This led to companies offering SEO (Search Engine Optimisation – at a fee of course), and kicked off something of an arms race between search engine spammers and search engines – with the rest of us caught in the middle.

Google came to realise that there is only so much you can determine from the content of a website. Far more telling is the amount of people that link to your website. For example lets say I have a site about Gardening. A webmaster of a popular site may happen to read one of my gardening articles, and link to my site using the text “Check out these Gardening tips”. Google will notice that other sites are linking to mine, and determine that it must be a useful site.

On the flip side of the coin if a spammer puts together a site that is full of nothing but ads, no one in their right mind is going to link it, so Google will not rate the site very highly. Where this can be influenced is when a webmaster has many sites – the webmaster can link all of their sites to each other. The impact of that tends to be fairly small, and Google seems to have some clever tricks up their sleeve to detect that sort of behaviour.

Where does this leave us? how does Joe Webmaster get people to notice his site? Well, luckily there are still ways to get noticed. Firstly make sure you have good original content. You can copy articles from other webpages, but its not going to help your google rank if thousands of other people have copied the same article. This is why I stress that you need original content. Once you have some original content, submit your article (along with a link back to your site) to free article sites (such as GoArticles). This will encourage other webmasters to use your article, which of course links back to your site, which means your google rank goes up. It’s really as easy as that.

Getting people to link to your site is known as “offpage optimization”. The downside to this type of optimisation is that you don’t have much control as onpage optimisation”. The upside is that you’ll have a great site full of original content, which has only got to be a good thing, right?

Daniel Neilson is a webmaster and software developer based in Brisbane. See more of his articles at his home page www.kdook.com