This one has us pretty amazed, when Google did the latest round of page rank adjustments, Google itself slipped to a PR of 9, while Google’s biggest competitor, Facebook went to 10.

Aside from demonstrating that Google is completely unbiased with the page ranking system, it is also the strongest indication yet of the importance of visitor time on the website being an important factor in calculating page rank.

Think about it, the more effective Google is as a search engine, the more quickly people will find what they are looking for and the less time they will spend on Google. Conversely, a social networking website like facebook should hold vsitors for a long time.

So what is the SEO Tip for the average website owner wanting to rank highly in Google? Keep tweaking your website to make it an engaging experience for visitors. Sure it’s important to have people linking to your site and to be indexed in directories and good PR across the web, but if your website is not holding the visitors when they get there, you will probably struggle more and more to maintain a good rank in search engine results. And anyway, the whole purpose of having a website is to attract visitors, engage in some way and get them to take some kind of action before they leave.

What you do off-site with SEO, such as Directory linking, link exchange or even web 2.0 linking will have absolutely no impact on your Search Engine ranking  if your website is not optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank in.

Sounds absurd, but this is a common scenario:  A great set of keywords is identified for a client to rank in. Of course it is a generic phrase that gets some searches, let’s say it is ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the client’s site is about one particular mountain bike accessory called the ‘Warburton testicle protector’ which stops you falling forward on to the frame when you hit a bump. Now the url is testicleprotector.com and the <h1> header is “Warburton Testicle Protector” and so is the page title.

So our SEO guns go out and do a truckload of linking etc. without effect. Because Google wants to rank pages about Mountain Bike Accessories under the keywords ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the Google bot has no idea that the Warburton Testicle Protector is a mountain bike accessory. You need to let it know.

Opinions will vary throughout the SEO community about what Google likes or doesn’t like with on-site SEO, but what I have personally seen work best is URL,  <h1> Title and document title in that order. I have seen a site disappear from Google results simply because a company artist decided graphical headings would look better than ugly HTML <h1> headings.

OK, so does Warburton go out and register mountainbikeaccessories.com? and change his whole website? That would be better, but as a second best option, he could make a page called mountain-bike-accessories.html and optimize that one. The rest is easier, <title> tag or document title should be ‘keywords – company’ or ‘keywords – product’ always keywords first, as should the <h1> header.

And it’s amazing the number of developers who don’t use the <h1> tags, given their importance in the process. They create their own css style called “heading” or “pagehead” – If they have done this to your website, point out to them politely that they could take that same styling and apply it to the <H1> tag, allowing you to do some on-site SEO.

So again, good SEO starts with

1. keyword research and if you are not sure how to go about this, find a good SEO company to help you.
2. Next test these keywords with a PPC campaign to see if they really produce inquiries. Here, I would really suggest you have an experienced Adwords management consultant involved to minimize your click costs.
3. On-site SEO. Tell Google (and the others) what your site is about – especially in terms of what people are searching for.
4. Tell the world about it – directories, link exchanges, web 2.0

If you’re ever in doubt about whether to do something or not, ask yourself  ”is this easy to cheat?” and  ”if Google is trying to find the most relevant sites, would this be important?” and be guided by the answer. Remember, Google’s survival depends on returning the most relevant results for searches and catching out the cheats.