Understanding Google - What You Need To Know To Conquer This Search Engine Giant

Use a keyword density of about 1 to 2%. Use to be that you could rank high with 5% to 15%, but not any more. Google will call that "over optimizing" and penalize you.

Don't use more than 83 characters (including spaces) in your meta title tag. That usually comes out to about 10 to 15 words. If you have more characters, there is no penality it's just that Google won't count them as being in your title tag.

Your important keywords absolutely MUST be in your title. (That is if you want them to achieve any importance at all.)

Google doesn't use the description tag for a description like some search engines do, but take the time to write a good description of your site anyway. Google does index the words in the description tag just like they were words in the text. Be sure to use keywords in your description tag. Google only looks at approximately the first 25 words in the description tag.

The keyword tag is NOT indexed or counted by Google. So why should you use it you might ask. One of the minor search engines still use it for the time being. But, I use the keyword tag on every page to remind me what keywords I am optimizing the page for.

Google indexes all of the visible text on a page up about 100k. This is way more than you would ever be using anyway.

Google counts "cat" and "Cat" as the same word. In other words, Google is NOT case sensitive.

Very important: Google counts "dog" and "dogs" as two totally different words. Singular and plural versions of a word are different words for Google. Google also counts "run" and "running" as different words. Word-stemming creates different words.

Keyword order is important. "atlanta restaurants" is NOT the same as 'restaurants atlanta"

A hyphen is the same as a space with Google. "Nashville-singers" is the same as Nashville singers"

Google likes sites with a LOT of pages. A good goal would be to add one new page a week. Your site should have a minimum of 3 to 5 page to start with. More pages would be much better. Link each one of them back to your home page. You can also link every page to every other page.

Look at the different linking strategies described in other articles on this site.

The most important thing to remember about Google is to have as many incoming (on-topic) links as possibe.

Try to add at least one or more incoming links every week. (You won't even be listed on Google until you have at least one incoming link from another site that is already listed on Google.)

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership software