Everybody Wants a Piece of the Google Pie

Previously known as the niche site for Internet geeks, Google is now Wall Street Journal's best Internet search engine, and has a fan following to justify this title. Officiating in the auspicious marriage of search engine optimization with website design and development is what Google has become known for. This it ensures with the help of certain guidelines, which serve as the commandments for any newbie optimizer. Modeled in the form content and design guidelines, technical guidelines and quality guidelines, along with, some general guidelines, Google wishes to streamline the kind of web sites that it lists.

In the age of SEO and SEM, website design does not end at designing a website with visual design, graphics and content. It is essential for the long life of any website, nowadays, to be modeled around comprehensive SEO strategies aimed at achieving high page ranks as well as search engine positioning. Basically, every web master creates his or her page with the ultimate intent of entering the first five entries or at least the first page of search engine listing. This is where Google steps in. It has become a phenomenal brand everybody wants to be associated with. Google has created an unconquerable place for itself where it stands out as leading the Search engine fraternity. Without commercially creating products or services extensively they have become a multi billion dollar; multi national behemoth.

Google is the new place under the sun, every body with a website now wants a top place in the Google search results page. Organizations spend thousands of dollars; devise specialized teams and strategies, streamline processes and marketing acumen according to Google guidelines to please the Google gods - all for that elusive first page placement on the superhuman search engine.

The following techniques are part of the SEO campaign of almost every self respecting website design development and search engine optimizing company:

PPC - Pay per Click campaigns were popularized by Google itself through Google Adwords. It offers a paid advertising service wherein a user has to bid for keywords and then depending on the competition for that particular keyword he/she invests a certain amount of money for it to advertise a related ad as part of Google's sponsored link. If the competition for your keyword is high the more money you will have to shell out to appear on the top.

Search Engine Submissions - Involve submitting pages of your website or your entire website to search engines. Google has certain guidelines that need to be followed to be eligible to submit to it.

Reciprocal Linking - Considered a must for small sites looking to increase their individual page rank. It is the process of placing your link on related websites and in turn placing a reciprocal link to their site on your website. You can gain the advantage of the Page Rank and quality of your reciprocal link partner in this way.

META Tags - HTML tags which are useful to both readers and search engines are encouraged by seasoned search engine experts and search engines alike. The Title tag contains a short but comprehensive title regarding the content and/or context of the page. The Description tag contains a short, descriptive account of the contents of the page. It is usually rich in keywords arranged in a systematic yet, legible fashion.

Apart from these 'simple' guidelines Google also encourages checking for broken links and correct HTML coding for your site, creating information based and useful content for your pages instead of keyword stuffed marketing jargon and keeping text out of images as Google bots are unable to recognize text integrated into images.

Some under handed tricks, commonly known as Black hat SEO, are techniques to increase search engine ranking and site popularity which more or less go against the Google guidelines. Hence, they are basically frowned upon by the Search Engine fraternity and are considered 'illegal'. These techniques look to work around set guidelines and respectable SEO and exploit certain weaknesses of search engine bots. In the search engine context, they are usually known as spamdexing and include cloaking, content spamming, link spamming and mirror websites. Leading search engines such as Google have modified their search engine algorithms to get around spam.

Doorway Pages - Some doorway pages can, using sneaky redirects, copy the Google page rank of another page. This trick redirects the search engine spider to a page with a higher page rank without affecting the user. Doorway pages that show a certain version of to the search engine and quite another to the reader use some form of cloaking.

Hidden Text or Links - are text or links that are not visible to users or readers but readable by search engines. People resort to putting keywords as hidden text on their websites to get crawled more often for a particular keyword. This was successful a few years ago when search engine robots could only read the words on the website, but now, hidden text or links are easily spotted by search engines and pages can be removed from the Google index.

content Spamming - Unless content specific doorway pages are created conforming to search engine guidelines they are considered as content spamming. Google judges the search engine friendliness o a website based on, the keyword to content density, Alt- Title tags, navigation friendliness and key word supported Title tags.

Sneaky, illegal or otherwise, you will find thousands of tips, tricks and articles doling out advise on 'How to get in the Top ten on the first page of Google's search engine listings?'. There are ardent members and visitors hanging on to every word of SEO 'experts', corporations paying thousands of dollars to SEO specialists and service providers who are grappling with the concept themselves and webmasters toiling over their websites design, coding and content aiming at that just right consistency. Because at the end of every webmaster's day, all he/she really wants is a piece of the Google pie.