There are several basic factors which determine if a website is going to break into the top10 rankings or if it’ll be forgotten in time. All these factors are clearly described below and even if you have a website, or if you plan to build a new one in a short time, follow the guidelines and you will attract visitors like never before.

1) Analyse your competitors

Complete analysis of your competitors gives you the advantage of choosing the right interest area of your website. It simply means if there are many similar websites with mostly the same features like forums, photogallery, and so on, you should create some unique feature on your website. I won’t tell you exactly what to create, because I don’t know anything about your website, but it sometimes takes 1 year to find what are people looking for.

The result of the competitors analysis could be divided into the following points:

• 1) There are enough opportunities to reach good positions for certain keywords, which will bring many visitors to the website (about 10 000 000 competitors)
• 2) There are enough opportunities to reach average positions for certain keywords and whether the website will need small or large amounts SEO in order to become popular (up to 100 000 000 – 200 000 000 competitors in the area of interest)
• 3) There isn’t any chance to get into the top10 unless a very complex SEO campaign is done (more than 200 000 000 competitors in the area)

Of course, the easiest way is the first one. Be sure to choose the keywords wisely. A bad start could mean many problems such as few visitors. Also analyse the incoming links to your potential competitors too. Sometimes it’s easy to get into the top10 just because the first place is occupied by a site with about 50 incoming links, even there are 50 000 000+ competitors.

2) Create or update your site to be large and offer people what they are looking for

These days many people, especially unexperienced SEOs, say that static sites are the best solution. Well, it’s true that static URLs are followed very easy, but don’t forget about Google’s power. Google is the most sophisticated search engine and it easy follows/indexes dynamic links if they’re written properly. I will create a tool which will allow you to check if a dynamic URL is easy to follow. This tool should be available from 08/10/2006.

Large sites naturally use some database system to run on. Databases mean opportunities which can’t be transferred into any monetry value. Databases allow a user to create/update or delete any content very easily. With a good content management system (CMS), it is actually a stronger weapon than any on-site or off-site search engine optimisation in the SEO battle. Databases may store things like articles, images, or any other useful information for people. With this idea in the mind, you should understand that any large site can be updated very easy, which isn’t possible for static sites. Static sites are characterised by html or htm files which don’t allow a user to use any script language inside them. Unlike PHP, which offers static URLs as well as dynamically generated content, files with an HTML extension are not very complete solutions.

Google also easily determines if a website is using any content management system. There’s a simple formula which says the more pages on a website the higher the probability of some CMS. Sometimes, html pages are generated through CMS too.

Before you create any engine for your website, make sure you’re going to write about things which people are really looking for. Don’t write about computers, because people are more interested in their hobbies. Write about cars, sports, DIY, fashion or any other theme which is familiar to you. Don’t create a 50 page website, because you will not get enough importance. Try to create at least 1000 pages, but don’t hesitate to create a very large site which includes 10000 different pages.

3) Update your site’s content on a regular basis

The worst thing to do is to create a website with some content and features and not to update it regulary. Visitors are real people and if they don’t find any new content, any new feature, they will probably not visit your site again. Updates keep your site alive and they keep your competitors behind you.

What else you can do is to allow the visitors to add their content to your website. About 1%-10% of visitors will gladly submit their ideas and comments, so go ahead and create a small function which will mean a great PLUS for your website. The result will be that people will come back to see if anyone has left another comment and search engines will find new content too. New content primarily means new phrases.

4) Do a strong SEO campaign

SEO is divided into two areas today. The first one relates to on-site optimisation. The old on-site optimisation was based on meta tags as well as usage of bold keywords besides italic text and so. Even these factors still have their non-zero weight, the more important factor is the content. I dedicated the article named „Writing an optimised article“ to the content, so I won’t be telling you about how to write optimised content for today’s algorithms.

Establish new links pointing to your site. The article named „PageRank 0 links. Link or not?“ is dedicated to the links’ strategy.

5) The conclusion

There’s no need to write anything since we can aggregate the previous ideas into the following picture: