There are millions of blogs and websites on internet. Many experts claim that there are more than 200 million websites and 150 million blogs. Now you can feel the pressure a new webmaster would have while launching a new website. How to reach the first page of Google on search of relevant keywords is a big challenge for every webmaster or blogger? There are many ways to optimize your site for Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Live and other search engines. But believe me most of them are obsolete now due to regular changes in algorithms of major search engines.

Earlier during initial days of internet, search engines used to refer the meta tags in websites to rank them on relevant keywords. So if you used to have “apple” as a keyword in your meta tag then your website will be ranked higher on search of apple in search engines as compared to other websites whose meta tag is not apple. I agree it is still one of the criteria but not the only one. Now search engines give less priority to meta tags.

Let’s discuss about Google. If you want to be on top in Google, then there is only one factor. It is called PageRank. If the pagerank of the site is higher, no one can stop it from reaching the first page. Google Page Rank is actually the numerical value(out of 10) of importance of a web page on internet. A higher PageRank gives you higher ranking in Google search. According to Google, PageRank of a webpage is determined using more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. But if your blog or site has low pagerank then don’t worry there are thousands of other factors which determine search engine rankings. Once upon a time, the page rank of my blog was 4. Now it is only 2. Google has penalized my blog for writing paid reviews and selling links. But I don’t care. I still get good search engine traffic due to large variety of quality content on my blog. So I believe, content is still the king on internet. If you have good content, you will always get good traffic from search engines as they love to index sites with new and fresh content with regular updates.

These days webmasters are also trying to manipulate the page rank. It is possible to increase the page rank by increasing the back links for the web site. This is called link farming in the language of SEO. Even many SEO professionals use link exchange for this purpose. Other way to write posts in popular forums and adding link of your site in the form of signature. But due to recent updates in algorithms of most of the search engines, these SEO tricks are no longer useful. Even Google is now considering all these SEO activities as spamming.

Another important factor is age of the site. The longer the site has been online on internet and the longer the page has visible to users, search engines give it a better ranking on the assumption that the site is reliable and must have really something useful content for its visitors.

Now I will conclude with these lines “Never design your website or blog for search engines. Give your visitors first priority. Always Concentrate on quality content. Just do some basic SEO changes on the site.” This is what I am doing on abhisays.