We have been working with a nearby company, Annapolis Clean Carpet to help them move up in the ranking in the different search engines. We have had some problems with it at first, but let me tell you the general idea.
Black Hole
No one truly knows what the algorithm is that the search engines use to figure out ranking. They don’t want you to know it because otherwise everyone would try to game it and that would defeat the purpose of their algorithm. People try and game it as it is of course, but the search engine algorithms get smarter all the time.
It used to be that keywords were important (they still are), but everyone started doing what is known as keyword stuffing. They would just have a page of keyword after keyword and there was no sense to it except for trying to rank. Now the search engines penalize you if you do that.
Content
Some of the things that help with ranking are common sense. One of those is content. Content can mean both pictures and text, but for search engine ranking, text is by far more important. The more text and the more pages the better. It is also important to include as many keywords and keyword phrases as possible. These are the things that people type into the search engine when they are looking for your service or product.
Citations and Social Media
Citations basically involves your name, address and phone number. It is important to have this consistent from one site to another. There are many sites like Yelp, Yellow Pages and dozens of others that are the modern equivalent of phone books. People go to those sites looking to see what reviews businesses have received or just looking to find companies in the area. If you aren’t in them, you won’t be found. Also, the search engines like it the more you are in. It is for the search engines that you need to be consistent in how consistently you are listed. Similarly, there are social sites like Bing and Yahoo where the same concepts apply.
Links
The more people link to your website, the more the search engines like it. It is like a popularity vote. If you don’t have any links, the search engines will not take your site seriously. They want a good experience for their users and want to send them to sites that other people think are worthwhile. So, the more links the better, but also what type of links is important. If the link to your website are from Wikipedia and NBC and places like that, even if there aren’t many, that will really boost your ranking. With Annapolis Clean Carpet, we think we had some issues with links, but we will never know for sure.