Achieving high rankings in the world’s most popular search engine is something we’ve been trying to do for just over 10 years. During that time a lot has changed. Petrol prices have soared, the music industry has been lost to the cesspit of telephone voting by teenage girls and unsurprisingly Google, one of the fastest growing companies in the world, has changed too.

Google was first founded in 1996. It was, at that time entirely home-grown and the brain child of two incredibly clever Stanford PHD students. These students were called Larry and Sergei and they had a project nicknamed ‘BackRub’. It quickly revolutionised ‘internet search’ and the ‘PageRank algorithm’ was born.

PageRank assigned importance to websites based on how many other pages linked to them and this was the theory that, together with some advanced mathematical indexing techniques, first propelled Google to commercial success. At first the company ran from a hub on the Stanford website, but it was soon clear it needed to grow on stronger servers and have its own incubation tank. The Google domain name was registered on the 4th of September in 1998 and the rest, as they say, is history.

Well, not really. There’s much more to it than that because unlike competitors at the time (Lycos, Yahoo! Search, etc) Google sparked something, it set something off. A type of competition emerged that the internet probably wasn’t ready for; – we all wanted to rank higher and be more visible, to shout louder than the rest and we had to understand how Google worked to ‘beat it’ and get noticed. It was a fun new game.

Google in 1998
Humour me here. Imagine it’s 1998. You’ve just discovered the funniest thing in the world – a dancing hamster, and you’ve probably just played Resident Evil on your brand new Dreamcast. Run DMC had the only decent Number One Single of the year, with the rest being made up of Boy Bands, Girls Bands, Euro Pop and bloody Cher… Those on the forefront of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 1998 quickly realised that the way to please Google was to do several simple things. Later that year you threw away your Dreamcast.

Anyway, you packed your website’s meta-tags with junk which is regularly searched for, hid text on the page by making it the same colour as the background (sophisticated?) and stuffed the rest of the text with keywords so that it read like a somewhat shonky broken robot. You traded links with anything with a pulse (the name BackRub is a less than subtle hint the large elements of Google’s ranking algorithm looked at link popularity – some things never change!). You may even have cloaked – presenting one version of the site to the IP addresses known to be search engine spiders and another to the everyday user. You probably spent a lot of time creating doorway pages and hosted a ton of these on different domains, all pointing (with the right link anchor text of course) to your main site. You interlinked between your own site network in a frenzy. Sound familiar?

These days, all of these techniques are deservedly considered to be bad practice and spammy but back then they were the height of cool. There were fewer websites on the net than there are now, so there was less competition but it was the dot.com revolution baby! So we had to get noticed and we did it by shouting nonsense.

Now jump into my time machine and accompany me to the present day… Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Google in 2008
It’s 2008, and Kings of Leon are the only decent Number One single of the year, the rest being made up of X factor winners, X Factor losers and X Factor wannabes. You have a Wii, a PS3 or an Xbox 360 and a progressive world view. President Elect Obama was just voted in to office by a landslide. These days, you don’t need to cram your website with cloaked content or add items to your meta-tags which have nothing to do with your products or services. This is a beautiful era.

Over the past 10 years Google has evolved to be better, bigger, stronger, faster and more comprehensive ranking system than any competitor, securing it as the industry leader and turning it into a multi-million dollar business. The Google offices are some of the most desirable places to work in the world (although even Googleplex has seen some cost cutting exercises as a result of the dreaded credit crunch). HRH the Queen of England visited Google this year. When the Queen pops over, you’re probably doing something right. Anyway, ranking highly these days is still achievable but the mountain is a lot higher and the climb a lot tougher.

To rank highly in 2008, you need to create well written content (or get someone else to) which provides genuine, unique, high quality information. The sort of information that makes people want to read it again or forward it to friends on Social Media websites and ‘back’ you. In short, the more people that love your content, the higher your rankings. In 2008 you need to publish the sort of information that teaches people new skills, provides them with quantifiable knowledge on a subject or really makes them laugh. The trick is to build up a library of outstanding content which has keyword allusions (2-4% density seems to be the industry recommendation) but nothing unnatural. In this way, people admire you and they link to you; they effectively share you. Because in 2008 that’s what the internet is all about. Sharing.

But it doesn’t stop at content. Remember BackRub? Still true. Google remains sensitive to link equity but it has wised up. No more “friends and family” networks. No more doorway domains. No more reciprocal linking with anything with a pulse. In 2008, link equity is about hard-won relevant links from relevant sites using relevant anchor text. Reciprocal linking is fine but MUST be on-theme and MUST be accompanied by other inbound and outbound links as part of a “natural” link structure. Use a link building firm by all means – there are some really good ones out there (and even more dreadful ones!) but expect hard work. Win relevant links at a sensible pace – too many too quickly and you’re in OOP (over optimisation penalty) territory. Linking in 2008 is about exchange of value: offer affiliate revenues if you can. Offer content in return for a link. Offer a decent return link. Whatever you do, offer something!

And whilst we are on the subject of optimisation, the basics still matter: your site’s code needs to be properly constructed. Not too much Javascript or code at the top of the page. Judicious use of meta title and description tags. Non-spammy use of keyword tags (Google is held to use these as a negative ranking factor these days). Use the H1, H2 and H3 tags. Use ALT tags on images. If you can, consider using CSS divisional layers to create your site – all the benefits and none of the penalties of cloaking: the code you create is search engine friendly and optimised and the users see the site as you would wish them to. All perfectly legitimate.

So go forth, create mind-blowingly brilliant websites with rich content and hard-won link equity and get noticed! And stop looking at dancing hamsters all day!

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