Any SEO fact finding mission will inevitably lead to reports from webmasters on how Google doomed or saved their website. True to human nature, those who feel hard done by are most often the loudest of the talkers. For every report of how Google has lavished a website with tens of thousands of visitors there are probably ten, a hundred or even more reports of how Google have doomed sites to failure.

Persuading Google To Respect Your Site

In all honesty, a webmaster that is looking for search engine success must gently persuade Google to love them. The rewards for doing so are far greater than any other form of advertising or marketing. Conversely, the punishment for sites left out in the cold by Google really is enough to break the soul of any webmaster.

The Google Effect

According to statistics, Google received 91 million American searches per day in the month of March 2006. Their closest rival, Yahoo, managed 60 million and MSN, in third place racked up only 28 million searches per day in the same period. It would be foolhardy to ignore other search engines but to ignore the 43% Google market share is outright online suicide and persuading Google that your site offers everything their visitors want will inevitably give you advantage with the remaining search engines too.

The Most Important Point

OK, so this is hardly breaking news – after all, every SEO site on the Internet harps on about Google being the be all and end all of online marketing but it is a vitally important point that you must pay attention to. One of the major contributing factors for Google’s success is trust. So many billions of people regularly use Google to search because they trust the results will be as close to relevant as is virtually possible. There is no way to financially hammer your way to the top of the listings and even the sponsored listings at the side of the page are quite clearly listed as exactly that. Remember this point:

Google has become successful by providing relevant results to their visitors and they reward websites for doing the same.

Understanding Google Algorithms

The exact science behind Google algorithms are as much of a mystery as the whereabouts of your missing socks but there are certain factors that all good SEOs and webmasters know.

The right amount of relevant content and a clean design indicates a useful website.

Tricks and underhand SEO tactics are a thing of the past. They are best left to webmasters who know no better. That’s not to say there aren’t guidelines you should follows to ensure a greater success for your site. However, SEO guidelines are beginning to merge with visitor optimization tactics.

Love Your Visitors

Including keywords" is still vital but not to set percentages. The inclusion of keywords makes the reading of your content easier for your visitors and has the added benefit that it also signifies a topic for your website making it easier for Google to assess it’s relevance. Similarly, a clean and simple website design is easy on the eye and quick to navigate for visitors and Google spiders can easily crawl your website.

So, in order to optimize your website for Google you should primarily optimize for visitors.

Give It A Little Time

This neatly brings us to the question of the Google sandbox. This name has been given to the phenomenon that Google essentially ignore websites for the first few weeks of their inception. Clearly, this is an irritant to many webmasters and one of the least understandable parts of their algorithms.

The principle behind the action is to ensure that brand new sites don’t pay for thousands of inbound links and propel themselves to the top of the rankings illegitimately. Google have always strived to ensure that links are gained organically based on the relevance and strength of a website and its content. Purchasing links completely bypasses this and, in Google’s opinion, degrades the value of linking.

What To Do

The next time you sit down to promote a website with the view of increasing your standings within the search engine results remember that ignoring Google because you’ve read bad press from other webmasters is a dangerous choice. Google is, by far, the most widely used search engine on the web and optimizing" your site to climb the ranks is easier than many would have you believe. Among the key ingredients is fresh, original content that is useful to your visitors. In order to build up links to your website, the submission of articles to article directories is one tactic that shows positive results.