When Google went online in late 1997, it entered a market that was already filled by several other competitors. To mention a few, Altavista, HotBot, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos had all managed to claim their own share of the searching industry. Despite being
late in the game, in four years Google has managed to secure a place for itself in the search engine world.

While many of the search engines that used to dominate the field have now fallen or become shadows of their former selves, nothing seems to be able to stop the success of Google. After gaining the position of providing secondary results to Yahoo from Inktomi in 2000, Google broke into the big league.Claiming to serve over 70 million searches each day through its own site and its affiliates, Google can arguably be called the most important and powerful search engine of today.

What has made Google grow so fast? Will they be able to continue their outstanding performance? Is it possible that they will be able to reach profitability without having to stuff the pages with advertisements like other search engines have done?

Ranking high at Google

Ranking high at Google - key number one

While there are numerous things measured by the Google algorithm, one thing seems to outweigh every other aspect. I'm talking about listings in the Open Directory Project. Google seems to heavily favor sites and pages that are listed in there. At the very least, you will have to be able to get your root/index page into the ODP. Attempt to include your most important keywords in the title and in the description you submit to the ODP. Having these words in the name of the category you're submitting to or in the URL you submit are also things that might have a positive effect

After you have been able to squeeze your index page into the directory, try to do the same to as many of your subpages as you can. ODP's rules state that in most cases, they will only list one page per site. Be careful while doing this, because excessive submitting can in extreme cases result in all of your pages being dropped from ODP and your site banned for life.

The minimum requirement is to make sure that each page has plenty of useful, unique content that is relevant to the category you are submitting to. It might also pay off to keep a brief "cooling off" period in between submissions. Include your most important keywords both in the title and the description you submit to the ODP. For example, if you sell cars in your online store called "Auto Shop", have a subpage about Ferrari Testarossa and you want it to rank highly for those words, the title and description you submit to ODP should be something like:

Title: "Auto Shop's Ferrari Testarossa page"

Ranking high at Google - key number two

The next part is to optimize the HTML code of the pages to match Google's algorithm as well as you can. While the ODP listings are the most important factor in the ranking, a completely unoptimized page that is listed in ODP can certainly be beat by a well-optimized page that is not in it. Of course, the best combination is a page that is both optimized and listed in the directory, what is exactly you should shoot for.

let's take a look at the various areas of page optimization for Google:

Title: The keyword or phrase should be included in the title of the page. However, it is probably best to include other words in addition to the keyword as well. For single keywords or two word phrases

Headings: Placing the keyphrase in a H1 or H2 heading at the very beginning of the page seems to work well.Use just the keyword or keyphrase without adding any other words into it. If the page in question is a very long one, using a H3 heading with the keyword in it every now and then to retain the focus doesn't seem to hurt.

Density: Google doesn't seem to be too picky about keyword density, just as long as the keyphrase is found often on the page. In many cases, Google seems to tolerate and even like very high keyword densities. The page should be somewhat "front-heavy", meaning that you should work the first instance of the keyword somewhere very near to the beginning of the page and make it appear once or twice fairly close to this first keyword, scattering the rest across the page.

Special words: Including the keyword in link text or in bold text does seem to give a slight advantage, but is not mandatory. Using the keyword in link text as more important than using it in bold.

Meta tags: Not useful with Google, but you won't get into trouble for using the standard keyword and description tags either.

Link popularity: As said, ODP links are gold, but links from other respected sources, especially Yahoo, can be very valuable as well. Links from normal pages, if you have a large number of them pointing at the page you're optimizing, will provide a good edge against the competition.

Themes: Haven't seen them playing a part in the Google algorithm, except if you count relevant link popularity as a part of themes.

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