Greetings Marketing Mud Fans!  My name is Nate and I design websites for Marketing Mud.  With the launch of our new website, and the amount of questions we have been receiving on the topic, I thought I would share my 2 cents regarding getting your page ranked higher in Google.  Whether you have a simple static HTML website, or a dynamic Content Management System (CMS) driven website, your goal will be the same.  You want to get people to your site!  As a web designer, one of the most common questions I get is "How do I get my page to the top of Google?".  While it can be a simple thing to do, it just doesn't happen overnight.  I am here to share my experience and opinions on the subject.  The most important thing to know is that Google is smart.  It doesn't fall for the old tricks anymore.  In fact, most of the old tricks now will have the opposite desired effect on your site.  Use only relevant keywords on your site, avoid hidden links and automated traffic, etc. Trust me, this is a good thing for everyone.

There seem to be many different opinions on how to climb google's rankings.  For a large part, exactly how google sees everything is a mystery, however with the varying opinions, there always seems to be 3 constants.  From my experience, these are the 'Big 3' things to concentrate on when getting your page to display at the top of search engines.:

• Relevant Content and Meta data:  Use keywords that are unique and relevant.  Title your pages according to the content, and location (if offering a service).  There are different ways to use keywords depending on the type of site you are building.  If you are using a CMS, incorporate extensions that will embed Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Friendly URL (SEF) automation within each page of the site.  If you are building a static HTML site, concentrate on using unique and relevant verbiage directly within the content, and manually title your pages.  When you are entering in the meta data and content into each page, think of relevance to the user, rather than relevance to search engines.  Your page will benefit accordingly.  A steady increase in relevant traffic is worth a lot more than an immediate increase in non-relevant traffic.  Flooding your site with keywords that dont have any relevance will hurt your site, not help it.

• Linking: Think of the web as exactly that, a 'web'.  The more parts of the web you are connected to, the more sturdy the foundation to build on.  Getting linked from other established sites is perhaps the most significant way you can help your site quickly.  The more sites that link to you, the more search engines will crawl through your web.  Link swapping with partner sites is beneficial, however being directly linked from a site with no link backs is even better.  Be careful though, you only want to be linked from relevant/legit sites.  If you are linked from a 'spam site', it will affect your site adversely.  Google calls these sites 'bad neighborhoods'.  You want to keep your site part of a good neighborhood.  Picture a sites users, and if they can benefit from being linked from this site.  While just being linked is helpful, its the traffic that follows that link that is the real benefit.  Often times sites will charge for space on their pages.  If you are on a budget, social networking sites are a great free resource.  You are limited to your inner 'network' through them however.

• Time:  Think about just how many pages there are on the web.  Thousands upon thousands of websites are built all the time just to serve a very short term purpose, or used as pure spam.  If google would feature all these sites, search engines would be useless.  Establishing your website over a long time period is essential.  When these search engines see a website that has been established for a significant amount of time, with constantly updated relevant content, your standing with search engines will improve.  This is why you don't see your page on Google's front page the week after you go live. 

By following these tips, and targeting your audience (rather than search engines) your ranking will improve.  Submitting your site to google will speed up the process a bit.  It serves as mainly a request to send Google's 'spiders' through your site to start the ball rolling.  Submitting a sitemap through google webmaster tools will let google know the structure of your site, and ensure full coverage.  If you are a business, entering your site into google as a business listing is great as well, you will get tagged on google maps, and will come up in local searches.  Be weary of websites offering to help increase your traffic.  Often times, they will just generate automated queries to your website.  This may show you higher #s in your tracking software, but that traffic is useless to you, being non-human.  Google even advises against it in their guidelines.  They can see where this traffic is coming from, and they can see this traffic is used to spam sites.  This will affect your site adversely.

At Marketing Mud, we enable SEO and SEF extensions in all of our CMS web pages, and we are always on hand to help guide and advise our clients with Search Engine Optomization.