Seems like I no sooner finish a Web site and the client wants to know why they are not top-billed in Google. Google has a very complicated algorithm for determining positioning in its indexes, but there are some known reasons. Here are my reasons:

1) The terms you want to be top in Google are nowhere on the site. The Google spider is pretty smart when it comes to what is on the Web site, but it is lousy at reading intentions. If the page title and headline do not say “Web development”, the index is unlikely to present your link under that category. Also, like any search engine, if the term is only used once in the text; it does not generate prominence in the index.

2) The term is not one of your keywords. Additional weight is given to using keywords in the head that match the page contents.

3) Your site has no logical sitemap, index linking or Google XML Sitemap that the service can use to get your content indexed. Some sites (not the ones I build) seem to smash the visiting Google spider on the homepage. The linking is only in a complicated javascript or CSS formulation that points to destinations unknown. Somewhere on the page there needs to be linking to the subpages. The more those links match the term desired to be indexed the better. By this time the reader should be saying that the spiders seem to be pretty dumb – i.e. we not only need to link to the page with the term, but name the page and headline the page with the same term. I will pause a moment for your A-ha moment. YES

4) Is your new site the lonliest site on the Web? Google gives prominence to sites that are well linked with other sites that also have the term. Today, few companies that are launching a new site invest the time and effort to see what the competing content is. A linking campaign is one in which you request links to your site from other indexes or sites that cover the term you think is important for your site. Rather than spending time and effort on expensive search engine optimizations (SEO), you will find it is very effective to get links from major sites that dominate your term or topic.

5) Since most competing sites are not going to give you links that boost your rankings, you need to conduct a launch campaign to registered your site in most search databases, and get links from news and general information sites.