You have to have external links to your site to generate a good page rank. You have to have a good keyword density to show up on search engines. The combination of page rank and keyword density is what seperates you from top and bottoms of the lists. Is this accurate?
You have to have links from websites related to your niche to boost you in rankings. You have to have external links to your site where the linking site has PR to get PR from that page. That's about the extent of what I know and understand so far, hopefully it may clear up a thing or two .
In part that is true. You also need good quality content that people search for. It has also been rumored that Google takes other factors into account such as the age of the domain, who registered it, where it is hosted, who links back to it, and how frequently it is updated.
So, if I'm linked to by sites that are completely unrelated to my content, but are high rank sites, does that help my rank at all? Or is it ignored? Ideally I would want to be linked to by high ranking sites that are relevant.
I remember reading about that. I'm going to get the short end of the stick in regards to the age of the domain. Who registered it - are you talking about the owner of the domain or the registrar? Where it is hosted - I'm using a web host that is costing me roughly $10 a month. Its a fairly popular webhost. This makes a difference? Who links back to it - According to Google, nobody is linking to it. Something I hope to remedy at some point in time. But my site is still under QA control atm. How frequently it is updated - The site is a financial site updated daily. However, the data on the front page (the only page indexed by Google), is cached weekly.
Almost all links are helpful, but links with good anchor text from related content websites are the best. While I do not know the exact formula, a good example would be to say that one link from a related page with good anchor text might be worth 25 links from unrelated pages. Note above that I said almost all links are helpful. There has been some talk that links from link farms and other "bad neighborhoods" on the Internet can actually lower your overall rankings. I would encourage you to focus on your content first. Once you have good content that is genuinely interesting people will link to you from their sites.
By "anchor text", you mean the clickable text that is on the referring site? ie: This is the anchor text
After the launch of Big Daddy, content relevancy has become an important factor, you cannot get good rankings only getting backlinks from high PR pages! Abhishek
I don't believe my problem is going to be the content. My product is relatively niche as it caters to a specific type of investor. I can remedy that by offerring tutorials to help new investors learn how to fully use the site. I firmly believe that once a user comes to the site and realizes the benefit, and how to use the tools, he'll return. My problem is getting them to recognize my existence in the first place without launching a marketing campaign.
I am talking about your name. If you have tied your name to crappy sites in the past, Google may just assume this one is crappy too since you registered it. If you are serious about your website and believe it will make a lot of money, invest in buying a dedicated server or at least start working with a local company who isn't heavily used by the public. If other people have hosted bad sites on the hosting company's IP before, Google may take that into account. Google doesn't reveal all of your back links. Never stop building backlinks. Never, ever, ever stop. When you stop building quality backlinks, you will fall in the SERPs. How is your page updated? Is it done in a Google friendly language like PHP or a non-friendly language like Java? If the site auto-updates, make sure it is done with PHP. If you are in the Google cache, that is a good sign. You might be sandboxed right now while Google figures out what to do with you. Be patient.
How far back do they go? I owned a lot of crappy sites about 9-10 years ago when there was only one registrar. I opted not to go with a subscription service. I have a full-time job and a family, and didn't want to be burdened by support issues that a pay site would have to commit to. Instead I'm going with an advertisement based system (currently AdSense) while I work on writing the ad package. Ok, that's good to know. I don't think I can fall much lower than I already am It is a .NET site (C# to be specific). Almost completely database driven. I have several applications that populate the database daily (after the stock markets close). I'd post a link to the site, but I think a mod would delete it (my account is only a day old).
By what logic are you making this claim? Whether you're using PHP or JSP, Google doesn't care. If you're talking about search engine friendly URLs (e.g. mod_rewrite in apache), then that can be done with JSPs too. Edit: I just realized I think you're talking about javascript on the client, instead of using a server side language like PHP. I don't know anyone who seriously uses a javascript-only solution to providing updates to a page. Javascript with Ajax maybe, but that still requires server side coding.
Hi pher, As mentioned above (am too lazy to quote), never use google to check your backlinks, use MSN to do so since it's generally more faster! Looks interesting, some real nice SEO could work for this domain a lot! Regarding keyword density I would beg to differ, IMHO quality content is what matters! To prove my point, you may go and search for the term "Click here" in google The page http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html ranks on top of 3,760,000,000 pages but still the page doesn't have a mention of the words "Click here" in it, i.e the keyword density is 0.00% Consider investing in SEO, Search Engine Marketing is the biggest boom right now, and to cater to that "specific type of investor's" needs! You will have to get among the Search Engine's, so he finds you when he is looking for you! Apart from that, since you are offering something niche, and something that, in your opinion, would make your user come back! Consider going in for a Press release! This will eventually help you a lot and spread the word about your site! Abhishek
Thanks for your insight, it is appreciated. Curious about the Press Release. I did some cursory reading on the other section of the forums regarding press releases. My old company used to issue press releases quite frequently. I forget who we released them through, but each submission costs us roughly $75. This was issued through the newswires. This isn't what you are referring to, or is it?