Even though there have been significant changes in how google presents search results there really hasn’t been a huge change in what google uses to put you on the top of the results.

Google has certainly moved to favoring local business in it’s search results. This alone has made it easier to get better rankings for sites whose primary purpose is to promote a local business.  This means that if you search for Gourmet Coffee Shops your going to find results that are first local and second ranking well with google.  It appears that the further you are from the location of the business the lower the page is going to rank.  This is not to say that your not going to rank well in other data centers it is just going to be easier to get the local results.

So how do you get ranked well in Google? The basic strategy is still the same.  Google looks at each site as a popularity contest and uses a variety of things to determine how popular your site is compared to others.  One of this is sure volume of backlinks and key words that are linked to your site.  Other factors are the content of your site, quality of the content, the frequency of change in your content.  The more and better content you have on your site the more your going to rank, the more people that visit your site the better your going to rank, the more of googles tools you use the better your going to rank.

One still tried and true method of getting links is pumping out articles to the many article sites that are out there.  This can be time consuming writing and posting articles but the work is worth the effort.  The better your content in your articles the more likely your content will be approved and posted with of course a link or two leading to your site.

Using Social Network sites is a great way to get links.  Setting up a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and other like accounts and putting up links to your site is another way to not only get links coming in but also a stream of traffic.

So while google has changed many things in how it presents search results, the way to get to the top of those results is still the same.. CONTENT, LINKS, CONTENT, LINKS… master them and you will see your results improve.

I had a WOW moment. Sites that are listed linking to a home site or page in either Webmaster, Site Explorer, or backlink checking of various means are it would seem to me to be sites that google, yahoo, bing or what ever have decided are important to your site and giving it significant enough juice to show up in the results no matter where you get them.

These sites, pages, should be social bookmarked and given even more juice to them which in tern gives more juice to the home site. Take a look at the following page for a diagram of what I am thinking about.

In the diagram below you will see the home property and how it is linked according to the link discovery devices out there.

Link Juice

Step 1:
This is the home page, and splash pages, they each have articles,  sites, etc…  that Webmaster or Site Explorer have discovered linking to you.

Step 2:
These sites are bookmarked by various users increasing the amount of juice each of these things carry.

In this way you take links that are already giving your site energy and energize them even more so that they become more important and thus what they link to, your home properties, becomes more important.

Think about the juice that could be added to your site by turning something that is linking to you from a PR 1 into PR3 or more?

Sparky

But what about the user? How about Joe Six Pack what are there for him to use, and webmasters/SEO specialists can use to our advantage.

The biggest un-talked about thing is Social Bookmarking.  Not many know about social bookmarking and if you search for other posts here you will find out what I am talking about.  Essentially like Digg, Mixx, etc… Google has it’s own bookmarking service.  You can find out more about how to install it here Google BookMarks. Basically this allows you like other bookmarking services to keep track of some of your favorite places on the net and allow Google to store them for you.

So how does this help out a website?

Well we all know that Google loves to gather data.  It’s essentially one of the greatest data miners that has been invented.  If it is on the web you can be certain that google has most likely scanned it and indexed the information.  This is how they determine what to show in a search result. Person types in what they are looking for, google examines the information it has mined and determines what is the best result.

But how does this help a website? Well what data do you think google takes as more important than other data it might come across?  Do you think that just cause it crawled and indexed your page that makes your page important?  Well look at your PR, look at where you rank for keywords.  Are you number one in search results?  Most likely not.  So your onsite and offsite SEO has not pushed you into even the first page.

I am clearly of the opinion that google likes itself and all the tools you have to use when making your website.  So what makes for a even better source of data for google to use in it’s determining what is a good search result for a user?  Data collected from other signed in Google users.

If anyone out there thinks that the SE that is hell bent on gobbling up all the data it can and is ignoring the data from it’s users (both signed in and not) would be simply foolish.  In fact I would venture to guess and research proves I am right, that google is giving more weight to what it’s users do than anything else.

Now the key is how to feed google information you want to show up well for.  The first thing you can do is go to the Google Bookmark link I gave you and if you do not already have a google account you create one and slowly start to bookmark your favorite sites.  Now the key here is that google has not really told or made widely public it’s bookmarking service.  It’s there, but it is not something like google image search that is right there on the front page of google, you have to look for it to find it.  So a great deal of care must be given when you start using the google bookmark service. You do not want to have too many bookmarks made of sites, at least at first, you certainly do not want to rush out there and bookmark your site as many times as you can yet.

The real key is making what your doing look natural. Would it be natural for a user to go out and just bookmark one site?  Would it be natural for a user to bookmark a hundred pages or sites in an evening? What would look natural, especially for a tool that is not widely promoted? Something slow and easy, building gradually over time.  Daily bookmarking of a favorite site would be fine, so long as it is not the same one over and over and over again.  Build a Bookmark profile that has all kinds of things in it the more the merrier, and along with all those other bookmarks you bookmark your favorite sites.

There is a second thing you can do to increase google paying attention to your bookmarks. Do a search first.  Search for the Keywords that your thinking your site should rank for.  Now look through the listings until you find your site.  Click on the link and go to the site.  Browse around the site, especially if the site uses analytics.  This makes it look like you searched for Flavored Coffee as an example and you found Coffee-n-Caffeine you clicked the search link, bingo a vote for a search link is in itself valueable to a degree, then you browsed around the site and bookmarked a couple of pages in the site as you traveled around.

What is this telling google? What this tells google is you were looking for flavored coffee you searched your found a site you liked and you bookmarked it.   3 points that google can look at and say, this must be the right kind of site for that kind of search. One you searched for a term and clicked on a site.  Two you traveled around the site, bookmarking things you like or want google to think you like.  Three Google analytics confirms that you went around the site.  All of these point to the fact that you as a user found the search result to be RELEVANT and if you found it relevant, enough so that you traveled to the site, moved around, bookmarked a few things and then moved on.  Is this a valuable source of data for Google to include in its search results?  In my mind yes VERY powerful.  You have just told the largest most used search engine YOU LIKE THIS STUFF.

So you give the data miner what they want… the gold.  Was this site relevant to the search they did?  Yea cause they clicked on it and traveled around the site.   Was the site so outstandingly relevant that you bookmarked various pages or the home page so you can remember where it is, obviously cause that is what you did.   Is that information then more relevant for other users? DAMN RIGHT IT IS.  The best metric google can use is what users like and don’t like.

WARNING THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS: There now as I say you have to be careful with this cause google can hurt you and hurt you bad if you do things the wrong way and do not make them look natural.  That is the key to all OFF SITE SEO is to do it naturally.  The more natural it looks the less likely google is to say wait a second something is not right here.

Happy Googleing

Sparky