Ranking in Google is not as hard as it is constantly made out to be. A lot of forums will beat on about how difficult this is and that you have to be aware of all the algorithm workings before you get to the top of Page 1 on Google. The truth is that to rank well for a very competitive market does take longer than if you were trying to rank for a small niche market but it is not difficult.

You have to be realistic in your goals. Don’t even bother trying to get to page one with “Credit Cards” or “Personal Loans”. These are highly competitive keywords and it would take you a lifetime to outrank the current page 1 holders.

The basic ingredients that you need to get noticed by Google are, links to your site, on page relevancy and basic title tag keyword insertion. The last 2 ingredients are no brainers and should be followed as a matter of course. The first ingredient is the most important.

If you don’t have links to your site your site is like an island with no connecting bridge. The spiders need to be able to find you from somewhere. Ranking for sites in Niche markets becomes very easy when you focus 90% of you time in building links back to your site. Now not just any links will do. The links to your site must contain the Keywords as anchor text that you wish to rank for. If you own a website on speed boats then the links to your site must have the words “Speed Boats” in the anchor text. You can and should suggest variations of your keywords to those that are linking back to you. Make sure you do not build your links too quickly as this will raise a red flag with Google. It should happen over time so that it looks organic in nature. Get links from all sorts of other websites. It’s a bit of a myth that you have to get links from sites that are similar to yours.

To recap as long as you have these key steps covered you will see a huge improvement in your rankings.

1. Links. Lots of them, built slowly and from any geographic location. Anchor text to be placed in the links to your sites. Vary the keywords in your anchor text. 3 Word anchor texts work best.

2. On site relevancy. If your anchor text is “Baby Joggers” than don’t write about Baby Cribs.

3. Title Tags: Make sure you have a good Title for your webpage. Make sure your keyword or variation thereof is included in the title.

If you can stick to these basic principles and you are competing in a niche market then you will be guaranteed good rankings as this is what Google is looking for.

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The Issue at Hand
Websites that utilize databases which can insert content into a webpage by way of a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript are increasingly popular. This type of site is considered dynamic. Many websites choose dynamic content over static content. This is because if a website has thousands of products or pages, writing or updating each static by hand is a monumental task.

There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site’s database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.
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It is out of question that quality backlinks are crucial to SEO success. More, the question is how to get them. While with on-page content optimization it seems easier because everything is up to you to do and decide, with backlinks it looks like you have to rely on others to work for your success. Well, this is partially true because while backlinks are links that start on another site and point to yours, you can discuss with the Web master of the other site details like the anchor text, for example. Yes, it is not the same as administering your own sites – i.e. you do not have total control over backlinks – but still there are many aspects that can be negotiated.
Getting Backlinks the Natural Way

The idea behind including backlinks as part of the page rank algorithm is that if a page is good, people will start linking to it. And the more backlinks a page has, the better. But in practice it is not exactly like this. Or at least you cannot always rely on the fact that your contents is good and people will link to you. Yes, if your content is good and relevant you can get a lot of quality backlinks, including from sites with similar topic as yours (and these are the most valuable kind of backlinks, especially if the anchor text contains your keywords) but what you get without efforts could be less than what you need to successfully promote your site. So, you will have to resort to other ways of acquiring quality backlinks as described next.
Ways to Build Backlinks
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1) Targetting the wrong keywords
This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2) Ignoring the Title tag
Leaving the tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3) A Flash website without a html alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don’t like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can’t read Flash content and therefore can’t index it.

4) JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can’t do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.
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There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content.

In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps‘, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

Why Use a Sitemap

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.
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