Google Search Results and Domain Names

“Google Search Results and Domain Names”

The ‘holy grail’ of the internet is your website’s ability to appear on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords.  If you can manage this then you WILL make money, however Google is hardly an open book when it comes to the criteria that it uses to order sites in the search results.  Google uses a complicated and ever-changing algorithm to determine its search results, however there are a number of known factors that help decide the placing of a particular website in the search results.

Factors in Google Search Results

1. The domain’s age
2. The number of ’backlinks’
3. The PageRank of these incoming links
4. The relevancy of the website
5. The frequency of content updates
6. A privacy policy, some contact information and a sitemap
7. The length of the domain’s registration

How can marketers optimize their sites?

1. The age of a domain is often beyond the control of marketers, however it is possible to purchase ‘aged’ domains from lists of ‘dropped’ domains.  Dropped domains are domain names which have been registered previously but are about to expire and can be registered for the regular price of around $10.  Some of these will still carry page rank and this will help your search results placement tremendously.  Generally speaking though, it is often difficult to find a relevant name in the dropped lists when you need to and the only choice open is to age the domain yourself – this oviously requires time!

2. A new site will begin with zero backlinks, how and how fast your site aquires backlinks is up to you.  You can go the natural path and just wait for other sites to link to you naturally, or you can actively seek them out.  Ways of generating backlinks include writing articles and submitting them to article directories, bookmarkeing them at social sites such as Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com, creating web 2.0 sites, such as Squidoo lenses and Hubpages and linking back to your site or through the use of ‘linking programs’.   A note of caution must be sounded; gaining too many backlinks too fast is allegedly viewed with suspicion by Google, as ‘unnatural’, and can actually harm your websites ranking.

3. The ’page rank’ of the sites that link to you is important as is the relevancy.  If you have a site that has the same number of backlinks as a competitor, then if your links come from a site with a higher page rank then you will rank higher.  however if your competitor’s links are from websites that are more relevant to the the topic of your site then it is likely that site will rank higher.

4. This may sound obvious, but it is surprising how many pages on a site claim to be about one thing but in the eyes of Google are actually about something else.  It is important to make sure that your domain name, your page titles, your tags and your content are highly relevant to each other.

5. Everytime you update your content you are sending a message to google – “Look at me, I’m new!”  Bookmark your content at social bookmarking sites and you will have the search engine spiders running to your site.  It’s all about relevancy and a site that is updated weekly is always going to be more relevant than a site that hasn’t been touched for a few months or even years.

6. This is the easiest point to improve, but probably the most overlooked.  Take the time - 15-30 minutes - to create pages for a privcy policy, contact information and an ’About’ page, as well as a site-map (which you should upload to Google).

7. Domains can be registered for anything between one and ten years.  Most people will register a doamin for a year and keep on renewing for a year each time.  A site that has a long registration period is thought to be viewed by google as more ‘trustworthy’ than a website that has just months left on its registration.  Google do not want to send searchers to a site that night not be around 6 months later.  If you have a good site that you will be keeping for years it is worth spending the money to secure a long registration.

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