I'm curious about this myself b/c I don't know how or what makes people rank on the first page of google.
I assumed you have to keep searching your site and get others to search your site often to give google the idea it is high in demand and so they list it at the top??
I typed in 'spray tan basildon' and you're listing at the top with 'Local Business results for spray tan near Basildson UK'. But you're actual web site 'about-tan' still wasn't appearing by page 12...
I will start by explaining the basics of SEO by a number of experiments I have personally been trying from a vtc tutorial I was going through, basically searching on google (the best to use IMO, though largely abstract searching like 'bounced mail (insert reason here for my mail servers reason for the bounced lol)' but then when it comes to say domain searching I went my name then various (what I call identifying keyword search terms).
Like I put my actual city/town location in say 2 days after my site went up online (my new slightly changed wordpress theme lol based on twenty eleven) was about maybe 3 or 5th in t he list of results thought hmmm wonder if I can improve that installed an all in one seo plugin for wordpress (can't tbh remember if that's the genuine name for it or not) put in those search keywords) and now im basically at least 2nd in the list of results so further up.
It's all about (with disregard to the wrong page being up or whatever) just a case of being firstly playing around with keywords that you want to highlight, say like I was doing a 30 day trial on web hosting (not doing any spamming here because I am not lol offering that at all here, I cant afford it) but say I was right? Why not say web, hosting, 30 days as your keywords in that article in your meta tags?
Hope this helps someone hugely!
This is a fantastic point ultimately what gives you much higher search index rankings (what really it's called on a somewhat techie sense):
Backlink from quality websites, ok this does make a lot of sense a back link is like a vote for your website. From what I understand google actually account for the content on the site the the link is located on. So If I create account on a gardening forum and a car fourm and link back to my website those links wont count for as much because they are from a non related website even though they are highly ranked. And good luck getting another highy rank salon in your market to link back to your site. They are your direct competitor.
That's the ultimate reason why people get the higher rankings, I was reading through a guide as to what makes googles search indexing work (or in a theoretical sense), actually forgotten its site name but to be honest (with no offence to anyone in this forum) I couldn't understand it and if I am a techie myself (self confessed one at that), then what's the hope for some on here? LOL
I mean the robot crawler (actually written in Python) is a very small but crucial component of how google finds sites and then that feeds into about 7-9 other (some bigger) components to make googles search engine work. It's really quite interesting stuff nonetheless though I didn't understand it all lol. But in all fairness they were just explaining how they think google would do what they do, there's no one saying on that research thats how they actually did that and this backs up my previous point (before the quoted text) its just a case of playing around with search terms (keywords) like my name plus my location in that particular example its my location thats t he keyword.
I hate the people that con others into thinking they need to pay for keyword terms or something that promises you to be added to the google search engine at all, or anything remotely related to SEO, fair enough if it's a kind of entirely different service to what you've been offered by a development company but... I mean (in the context of paying for search terms/keywords) they're only as good as what you are actually using or paying for rather, I mean get the wrong search terms googles not interested in how good your keywords are, they're there for nothing but profit. If you got the wrong search terms you might aswell take that money and either flush it down the toilet or put it down the drain outside your home whatever.
Actually research someone did in 2007, paying for marketing with google on search keywords only amounted to at the very most 30% of actual finalised sales from searching using when you pay google for it. Really there's very little point when you can probably do it yourself firstly for free and then get a much bigger margin. (coming from my ecommerce experience that though).
I can't remember if it was actually 30% in all fairness but it wasn't as much as I thought it would be, it's why people should not be concentrating on paying for search term marketing it's just a waste of time IMO.
Hope this helps some people (or some people?) in some way, I apologise for this lengthy post but I just don't like seeing people waste their time on things that sometimes don't simply work, it's great if say paying google for those search terms actually works for those people but it's only very limited and that's my point I am making.
All the best and good luck to people.
PS On a final note as it were, googles niche is exactly that, they started off from a research project idea at Harvard, in the idea of linking all these resources on the web at the time together, to allow people to find things easier on the web (least that's what I seem to remember them saying google started from), it ultimately became their niche as a market.
