Use your keywords

The more you use your keywords on your site, the higher the rank you will achieve with the search engines for those words. Using your keywords in the domain name will get a ranking boost and the keywords are highlighted in bold on the results page, making your website more visible.

Don’t ignore the URL

Ensure page URLs are descriptive and use your commonly searched for keywords to aid with this. This will help ensure search engines pick up on your keywords and give your site higher importance.

Use Sub-Domains

A sub-domain is part of a larger domain and can be used to assign a unique name to a particular department. Google currently views them as separate websites, which therefore allows you to capture an increased share of the search engine results page.

Go Local

Buy the top level domain (TLD) of the country your site is targeted at e.g. UK is co.uk, France is .fr, Germany is .de etc. It also helps if you combine this with in-country hosting, so make sure your website is hosted locally too.

Purchase Existing (or dropped) Domain Names

Look for domain names with a high number of backlinks to take advantage of their Page Rank by building a site on the domain. Google also takes into account a domain name’s age, so if you can buy an existing domain name that has been around for years, you will get a boost there as well.

Combine the right domain with good content

If you can find a domain name with a keyword related to your site’s topic, great, but remember that other SEO techniques must be used as well; you can’t just rely on having a good domain name. A strong brand built through great content, top services and useful tools is ideal for boosting your online presence. Adding relevant and up-to-date content to your site is invaluable for the search engines and will see your web profile lifted.

Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage. However, after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust. One Google representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”

A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.

Google’s response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.

The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimisation experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.

Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.