Some of us, including me, stand upside down and run around naked trying to get the search engines to rank our pages. Then there are others who just put up a link and the next morning it's there in the Top 3 in Google and Yahoo. What gives?

TRUSTED DOMAIN

Once you've climbed the mountain of linkbacks and buiding a content-heavy website, I believe the most important thing is to get the search engines to trust your domain. What does this mean? It means that the spiders believe your Anchor text. When you put up a link to a page that says 'Lesbian Videos', the spiders accept it at face value and give your page, instead of the one you're linking to - A ranking for 'Lesbian Videos'. So, instead of trying to get other people to link to you using 'Lesbian Videos', all you have to do is put in a single sentence on one page which contains the words 'Lesbian Videos'.

I bumped into this theory in rather an unwanted manner - I put links to all my new pages on my home page. The home page is bursting at it's seams with new and old content and a heck of a lot of keyword rich sentences. What happened was that the search engines started ranking my home page ahead of the actual content pages for the targeted keywords. Improved my ranking, but the surfer has to click through the home page to get to the actual content page. But then, he's also exposed to all the other site links that he finds on the home page, which increases the chances of a sale. You decide if it's a gift or curse.

Question: How does one reach this stage? Answer: As in most things in life, trust is built over a period of time and so long as you don't break it ( Or should I say - So long as you're not caught breaking it... ), you'll get there. Just keep following standard SEO procedure - New content, proper intra-site linking structure, strong external linkbacks. The spider comes in, finds new content every single day. I mean, the spider needs to find sites which it doesn't know about and has no information on - Again and again. Hard work - But rewarding.

USE TEXT FROM THE SPONSOR

When promoting a new site from a sponsor, make it a point to note down the site's title, description meta-tags and the other text and then use it in your description. Why? The plan is - You find new sites before the search engine. The search engine then associates the link and description found on your site with the keyword ( which is the domain URL of the sponsor's site ). Next it spiders the sponsors' site, where it finds the same text, description and tags. In a few days, other sites put up links to the site. But the search engine still keeps the sponsors' site and your site at the top - Because it found the text first on your site and it's what describes the site in question best, implying your association with the site - Sort of like your site is part of the sponsors' site.

MAKE NO MISTAKES

Errors, whether by accident or circumstance, lead to an inevitable degradation in your rankings. But more importantly, they significantly alter the bevaviour of the SE bots vis-a-vis your site. What mistakes? Server downtime, broken links, misleading links, redirection, Domain IP changes and deleted text.

The first five you can avoid, but the last one - Deleted Text - is critical. You can change text, to reflect updated content, but you cannot delete text. Say you have a sponsor who regularly comes out with new models. What you do is create a new page for each model, and put in a link to the new page on your home page, with a description. Now it's important that you don't just delete the link and description, but you replace it the new one. Reasons for deletion could be that the sponsor is not converting, but still - You can't just delete the link and description, and you also have to keep it updated with new ones as and when the sponsor releases the new model. This means that for that particular sponsor, the search engine trusts you to do the right thing and will reward you with a good ranking. Which in turn adds to your overall 'Trust Bank' with the SE's. In future, if you decide to add a new sponsor with regularly updated content / new sites, the search engines will immediately hoist you at the top, without waiting to see if you follow the 'rules'. That's called trust. Get the idea?

That about wraps it up - Be first in line when putting up links to new sites, understand the true meaning of updated text and don't make mistakes. Get rewarded with the trust of the search engines. In today's online world, very little else of more value than a 'Trusted Domain'.