What we do know is the following:

Pages should be well structured. By this I mean you should make sure that your keyword is in the page title, and within the body text but not “spammed” ie just repeating the keyword over and over again. This is where the algorithms come into play. The google bots can look at a page, look at the keywords that might be prominent and then see if the overall content reflects the keyword or not. If for example you repeate the keyword 10 times in a 100 word page of content, Google bots will know that this can not make sense. Imagine if you were talking to someone and you said:

Hi there, would you like to buy hosting? Hosting is really essential for your business. I sell hosting. Have you heard of hosting.

What would you think? Bit full on! Well the search engines are like that too. They can “understand” your page and look to make sure it is relevent.

A well strucutured page also means you should have a relevent name for the page. For example if you are targetting clients in Dublin for hosting, you might save the page as cheap_hosting_dublin.html – this puts your keywords within the url or web address and will help to increase your overall ranking.

Content is king. This can not be stressed enough. The more content on your site the more “useful” it is for the visitor. A site which simply lists your products and services will not rank highly. However a site that provides interesting and up to date content, and is updated on a very regular basis will move up the search engines. Think about it logically. Would you buy a magazine that has new stories that are 3 months out of date, or even 3 years? Well Google and other search engines are the same – they want up to date pages. After all they are in the business to provide the best search results.

Age of Domain. Believe it or not this is a factor. If you buy a domain name today and expect instant search engine ranking forget it. It takes time. You see if google sees a “new kid” on the block, they want to watch the site to make sure the site is not “ropey”. They are afraid that they might give you a good ranking for the keywords you are looking at and then change the content to something less than desirable. However if your domain name is a couple of years old you have a track record with the search engines so they may index and rank your pages quicker. As a rule of thumb I usually say it takes 6 – 8 weeks to get indexed by the search engines. Usually it happens quicker than this but it’s a good rule of thumb.

Backlinks. Google and other search engines will check to see who is linking back to you. The more people who link back from good quality sites the better. This is like a vote of confidence to your site. If no one links back to you then the search engines will think your content and site is not worthy of inclusion.

That’s just a few pointers at what you should do