One of Google News’s biggest features is something that would seem a little odd coming from anywhere but the company which proudly announces “this process is entirely automated; no humans are involved” on many of its product pages. Every aspect of what the end-user sees on Google News (outside of the initial page design) is entirely automated, with no human action involved in altering the front page or deciding which stories get the most visibility on the site.

This algorithmic approach to editorial selection is based upon the ‘StoryRank’ concept – a spin off of Google’s founding PageRank formula. Created relatively early in the company’s history by principal research scientist Krishna Bharat, it was first devised in 2001 in the aftermath of the 911 attacks to keep Bharat abreast of related developments.

Although it would be years until the service moved from the beta release of March 2002, Google News is particularly significant to the company as one of its first endeavours outside of plain text Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Today the service is available in different versions optimised for 19 different languages and across 40 different geographical regions and in 2010, Hitwise reported that it delivered 17.32% of all upstream traffic to online news providers in the US.

The key to understanding how Google News works is very similar to understanding the basic principle behind its Search technology; relevancy. Applying this concept to ‘News’ – to current events and developments – its clear to see why Google sets certain limits on its aggregator. Only articles that have been crawled in the past 30 days appear in Google News and to a great extent, websites (or ‘publishers’) with the highest PageRank will get greater visibility in News results than others.

One area of controversy that remains with Google News – aside from the ongoing debate regarding paid content and lost advertising revenues – is how the company selects which sources its software will draw stories from. Whilst the selection of stories is entirely automatic, the selection of online news providers still requires some human oversight.

This is largely due to an incident in March 2005 when the still-in-beta product was criticised for including material from the white supremacist magazine National Vanguard. Still, inclusion in Google News is largely automated; publishers simply submit a form to Google detailing their .xml feeds or the sitemaps for their news content. However unlike story selection, Google reserves the power to screen news sources if their inclusion would be problematic (i.e. content from National Vanguard).

The more I have been doing SEO the more I have learned this fact: Google loves content, aka words.

That FACT cannot be emphasized enough.

I will say it again.

The search engine, known as Google, loves text.  It is what they pride themselves on and they have the best system at reading, analyzing, and properly indexing it.

Flash, pictures, animation, and videos are great.  There is nothing wrong with those things (besides Flash, avoid that at all costs for SEO purposes) but they all must be accompanied by text.

My standard is at least 300 words of text on the home page and at least 150 words of text on any sub page I make.

I am on the internet at least ten hours a day.  Its how I make a living so I have to be.  And it surprises me that people still have not gotten this by now.  I see the most beautiful websites designed but they have little to no text.  And the owners of them, who spend thousands getting them made, cannot understand why it is not ranking for any of its terms.

Here are two suggestions I can give you when it comes to content that will help you immensely if you apply them

Home Page and Sub pages Must Have Enough Key Word Rich Content (On Page SEO)

When we get a new client we check two things before anything else.  First, we check to see if the coding is up to W3C standards (which it is usually not) and second item we inspect is the content.

When it comes to content we look for three important items in which the web designers most likely did not think about.

• 300 words of text on the home page

• all sub pages have some kind of text

• keywords are in the text enough for relevance but not overly so to where it looks like spam (this is actually an art as most people do this part wrong)

• check for duplicate content on Copyscape (big “no no” though Google lets local searches get away with it many times)

We still add videos, images, and all the other things to dress up a website but for search engine optimization purposes we make sure rich content either proceeds or follows all of those items.

Google Loves Articles (Off Page SEO)

Google has always and will always love articles.  I use article writing extensively when it comes to achieving first page ranking for my personal websites and my company’s clients.  I have gotten many websites to page one by writing 2-3 well written articles for them.

Ezine, GoArticles, Hubpages, and Tumblr are some of the best.  But more importantly is the type of article you write.

I do not know how Google bots can tell a good article from one that is not but, believe me, they can.  I have written 100s of articles on every topic imaginable and I have noticed that the ones I put a lot of work into and made them long, and I mean 600-800 words long, have done the best.

There are some Ezine articles I wrote back in February that are a PR3 right now.  That is seen as an authoritative article to Google.  I invested 20 minutes of research into a topic, one hour writing the article, and now three months later its a PR3.  Amazing!  Better than any reciprocal or forum link could have done.

Again, Google loves content.

Keep in mind that they make hundreds of millions off articles so you can understand why they are partial to them.

Every article directory has Adsense on their website now.  Look at all of them and you will see it.  Its everywhere.

Even the top notch ones like EHow, About.com, and Helium all use adsense ads to monetize their websites.  And Google gives anyone who feeds those directories with quality content higher rankings.

It is one of the tools I have used extensively to a steady stream of income of Google adsense revenue.

So, do ya’ like writing?

I hope so.  If you do not then SEO is going to be very difficult for you.  Usually people who do not like to write but still want to rank high in the SERPS resort to “black hat” because they are lazy.  Those techniques require very little work and anyone who does search engine optimization, and is good at it, can tell you its hours of work.

Hours of writing.  Hours of making content for your website and others.  But once you reach your goal its worth it.

Content is still king with Google. Remember its how they were able to beat Yahoo and MSN in the early 2000s.  People were noticing that when they did a search on Google they got more informational results while the others were producing crap. Tons of images but very little useful data.

The more useful content you create the better you will do.  Unless you want to mass comment spam other websites then it is something you will have to get used to.  Google loves words and the more you feed the “big G” what it loves the more it will in turn reward you.

The SEO Agency

This service aims to increase the online profile of your website in ‘organic search results’ – the list of websites and pages delivered to users by a search engine for a specific query. The process of boosting your ranking from page five to page one is known in-the-trade as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

By hiring an SEO agency, you’ll usually be purchasing a few separate services that work together to this end. The most basic and fundamental of these will be to provide you with an analysis of your position in the search market – to identify what keywords your competitors are ranking for, what queries your prospective customers are making and where your site currently sits in relation to each of these.

This is vitally important because in SEO, nothing exists in isolation; your ‘relevancy’ factor from a search engine is dependent on dozens of factors, not least of which is your competition. Whilst it would be nice to beat them at every relevant keyword, often it’s more cost-effective (and more feasible) to target a different keyword that might drive less overall traffic but could result in more conversions.

The next level of service will be in accomplishing the work of optimisation itself, now that you’ve got a clear picture of where you stand in the search-engine rankings and the online market. There’s two broad areas of work here; on-site optimisation and off-site optimisation.

Search engines rank websites for a huge variety of factors and not all of them are known; SEO agencies constantly try to work out which of these factors are in ascendancy and to a great extent, make extremely educated guesses at how they can improve your site. From site load speed to meta-data and maintaining an up-to-date siteplan (and a dozen other technical factors), your site can improve its relevancy for key search terms with some creative copywriting and site management.

Then there’s off-site optimisation – otherwise known as link-building. One of the earliest known (and the original idea for) factors for Google was the idea of link relevancy; the more people who link to a website, the more reliable it must be. To an extent crosslinking between pages of the same website can have this effect but it’s far more effective to generate links off-page, on other websites. SEO agencies will work to build good links to your site from a variety of sources; whether it’s a link on a partner page, generating content articles for dedicated linkbuilding sites, or promoting your own material across PR wires and other forms of online circulation, off-site building can be a huge undertaking but it inarguably gets results.

A good SEO optimized page title needs to be no more then 70 characters counting spaces. Since your page title is placed in the search results it is important to keep it less then 70 characters. If your page title is more then 70 characters then Google will cut it off in the search results. Titles cut off in the search results have a … at the end of the title and will result in a lower click through rate.

Your keywords are the important part of your page title. You’ll want to ensure your page title lists two or three keywords. It’s best to place the keywords in the title early versus at the end. I recommend focusing on two keywords, but you can push it to three if totally necessary.

You’ll see many sites simply place the keywords in the title with no selling. For instance, you see many titles like the following: Bad Credit Home Loans – Poor Credit Finance.

While the above title is optimized for SEO, it is important to realize that the search engines are not the only ones you need to please. You also need the searcher to click on the title. Adding a boring title like the above can influence how many clicks you get.

I highly recommend you get creative with your page title and try to make it sell. This will drive way more clicks then a boring page title and help differentiate your site from the competition. To add sales flavor to your title you’ll need to understand the mindset of the searcher.

For instance, for someone searching for bad credit home loans, the mindset of the searcher may be a little insecure. This searcher may also be frustrated with shopping from lender to lender trying to locate a lender that will approve bad credit applicants.

By understanding the above mindset of the searcher you could add some sales power to your title and still hit the necessary keywords. Perhaps you create a title, Trouble-Free Bad Credit Home Loans For Poor Credit Finance Applicants. Or even better, Guaranteed Bad Credit Home Loans For Poor Credit Finance Applicants.

The above two titles immediately solves the searchers emotional needs. This will result in a higher click rate then a generic keyword stuffed title such as Bad Credit Home Loans – Poor Credit Finance.

Here are some other tips for your site’s page titles:

1. Each page on your site should have a unique page title and be focused on different keywords. If all your pages have a page title that is too similar then your site could get caught in the Google duplicate content filter.
2. Make the keywords in your title a little different then the keyword in the meta description. For instance, if you place bad credit home loans in your title, use loans for bad credit in your meta description.
3. To maximize click through rates, always capitalize the first letter of each word in your page title. Don’t use all caps or all lower case.
4. Do not repeat the same keyword twice in the title.
5. Try to use semantic related keywords in your title. This will help with Google Latent Semantic Indexing. For instance, a semantic related word to loans, is finance. Don’t use loans twice in the title.
6. The page title should focus on the same keywords as the anchored internal links to the page. So if your page is primarily about bad credit home loans, then the internal links on your site should use the anchored text bad credit home loans.
7. For WordPress blogs the All In One SEO plugin has custom page title management to help you place a unique title on every page.

Based on my five years of testing, good on-page SEO can make a huge difference in your search ranking. Yes backlinks are more important, but don’t underrate on-page SEO. With Google filters if you don’t approach on-page SEO correct your site can disappear.

Over the last couple years, Google has made some serious strides at the tricky ways that are being used to beat its organic search results.  With Google, it is getting harder and harder to unnaturally influence your website’s organic search engine raking. 

The latest algorithm change in Google, downgraded the page rank and organic search results of sites that were selling link.  These websites that were selling links saw their page rank go lower and also their organic search results while many of the sites playing by Google’s rules saw their organic search engine results improve. 

Did you see your site’s page rank decrease?  My answer is who cares?  Page rank should be the last thing you should be worrying about in your business.  Sure it would be nice to have a high page rank, but in building your website’s organic search results there are so many more things you need to be concerned with.  In short, don’t waste time worry about page rank, especially the inaccurate page rank specified on the Google toolbar.

In building your online business, it is much better to develop a plan of action to make your website improve in the organic search results without just focusing on one factor like page rank.
 
Here are a few tips to get you going with improving your website’s organic search results:

1. Follow your expertise. Following your expertise is much more important today than every before.  With advanced algorithms like Latent Semantic Indexing, it is important to be an expert in your chosen market.  If you are expert you will naturally intertwine related industry words and semantic equivalents into your content.  This will help your website’s content appear very natural which is critical for the next evolution of organic search engine ranking.

2. Plan your site out before developing it. Without a doubt a good layout for your website can improve usability.  In planning out your site make sure you do thorough keyword research and break these keywords into common themes.  Then categorize your content by these themes.  By categorizing your content and site’s design into themes you will be way ahead of most of the sites on the web and positioning your website to rank in the organic search results well into the future.

In addition, a well planned out website will see a much lower bounce rate which is a key metric many search engines are tracking today.  A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or the percentage of visits in which a person left your site from the page they entered from.  Your website’s bounce rate shows the visit quality and thus a high bounce rate generally indicates that your sites entrance or design aren’t relevant to your visitors.

3. Build QUALITY link reputation. Joining high quality directories and partnering with other high quality websites in your industry will significantly improve your organic search engine results. These days the quality of your links is much more important than the quantity of links.  Joining the high quality directories online can create a huge boost for your organic search engine ranking.  Here are the top directories I recommend as critical:

• DMOZ.org
• Yahoo Directory
• Starting Point Directory
• Librarians’ Internet Index (LII)
• Joe Ant
• Chiff.com

Also, partnering with other high quality websites in your industry will help you build on the theme of your site and pass lots of link reputation.

4. Build tools on your website.  Building online tools on your website is a great way to get others in your industry to link to your site.  These links will look very natural which is a critical component to improving your organic search results.  One example of tools is the comprehensive list at Seo Chat.  For your website dig into your market and look for opportunities for tools that will add online value.

5. Frequently updating high quality content.  Keeping your website’s content updating frequently is a critical component of your organic search engine ranking strategy.  Look for recent news or other interesting fact in your market and create unique content that expands on it with your expert knowledge of the market or industry you compete.  This expert knowledge and viewpoint you provide will help give people a reason to link to your content driving deep links into your site.  Deep links are critical for organic search engine results.

6. Research your competition. Checking out your competition is a very important step in improving your organic search engine results.  Take a look at their site and see what is working and what is not. If possible, try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.  Look at who your competitors are partnering with and see if you can leverage a content sharing partnership with the same partners. 

7. Repetition is the key to victory. Building a solid business process for your website’s search engine optimization strategy will help ensure your success.  Focus on defining these processes so that you can easily repeat them and transfer them to future employees or interns.   Document the processes or even better record a video using Camtasia.  This way as you hire interns or new employees you do not have to spend tons of time training them.  You simply have your intern or employee watch the video that highlights all your search engine optimization processes and then they are ready to get to work.  Mastering repetition in your business processes can have a profound impact on your business.

In the end, taking a broad approach at getting organic search results will improve your sites performance much better than just worrying about page rank.

So what is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Basically, Latent Semantic Indexing is a fairly new technology which Google and other search engines are including as a part of their algorithm in order to improve search engine results. Latent Semantic Indexing looks to determine if your webpage is relevant by looking for natural patterns in words that are related to the topic of your webpage.

For instance, if you have a webpage related to the theme of computers, the LSI algorithm would scan your site for words actually associated with the term computers. Those words may include mentions of hard drives, Dell, servers, laptops, and software because these words would naturally be associated with content on the topic of computers.

It is very important you understand this concept.  The reason being is that now search engines are not only looking at your main keyword to determine if a webpage is relevant, they are also looking at the whole page and if the naturally related words to your main keyword are being used in the content.

Furthermore you should not just use Latent Semantic Indexing in your web content.  You should also consider using the concept when you get offsite links to your site.  The anchor text of the links and words around the links should include naturally related words.

If you want to stay in the top of the search results well into the future the bottom-line is that you should consider Latent Semantic Indexing as a key part of your SEO strategy.  Use lots of synonyms and related words in your content and links. Get close to your niche and learn the lingo so the related words flow naturally in your content.

Since most sites are not including Latent Semantic Indexing as a key part of their SEO strategy you have the potential to sky above them in the search results!