In this series of articles, I will discuss how to get your site to the top of the search results in google when someone searches a given keyword. As each article is published, a hyperlink will be added to the article list below. Top of Google Articles:
1) Choose Good Keywords to Optimize Your Site
2) Optimize Your Page URLs
3) The Art of Optimizing Content (HTML Tags and Text)
4) Create Links to Your Site
5) Boost Your Pagerank
6) Putting it All Together

Before diving in to the search engine optimization (SEO) articles there are a few key concepts that you must understand. These concepts will be covered more in depth over the course of the articles, but you should have a rough understanding for the time being.

Key Concepts:

  • Keyword Density - Keyword density is the ratio of the number of occurrences of a particular keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page. For instance if you have 1000 words on your page and the phrase “top of google” shows up three times. Your keyword density would be 3/1000.
  • Code to Text Ratio - The code to text ratio is a method for search engines to determine how much content you have on your site and the page relevancy. The lower your code to text ratio (more text and less code), the better odds you have of getting a good page ranking.
  • PageRank - According to Google’s definition, PageRank is a “formula developed by Google to determine a web pages ‘inbound link ranking’ Often referred to as ‘PR’ value.” Ultimately, PageRank is the algorithm that Google uses to determine the importance of your website. If one site has a pagerank of 6 (out of a possible 10), and another site has a pagerank of 3 and both pages are optimized to the keyword “Dog”, the site with a pagerank of 6 will show up first.
  • Meta Tags - Meta Tags are information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but instead which typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. They are placed within the tags of your html.
  • URL and URL Rewriting - If you don’t know what a URL is, good luck doing search engine optimization on your site. The URL is the unique address that you can find at the top of your browser that specifies the address of the webpage you are viewing. URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”. By optimizing the urls of each of your webpages you will be positioned to show up higher when searching specific keywords in a search engine. Take a look at the url of this specific article, it is optimized properly to show up as the first site in google when searching for “top of google”. If you are truly interested in the anatomy of a search engine then I recommend reading the original Google research paper written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.