Trial and error mainly, link lists were my biggest motivator, as they never listed my sites, everyone was telling me too submit to this and too submit to that, I’d spend hours doing sites that I thought were great only to never get listed. Search engines were picking up my pages and sending me traffic so after a while I just concluded that I could never get a site listed anywhere so I’d just keep on building for search engines. Then along came DMOZ, a directory that did not require a link back, so I would build and submit to DMOZ and interlink these sites to my own network. It was a understanding of page rank before I ever heard of page rank that kicked off my sites.
There are a few basics that you need to get your head around and for that you need to look at your pages from a bot point of view and have a limited understanding of how they work.
The first thing a bot will do when it visits your site is look for a robots.txt file, in this file you can tell the bot about areas of your site that you DON’T want it to index. if you want your whole site indexed then don’t worry about this file or just have it blank, personally I prefer to have a blank one. Here’s mine http://www.baldbastard.com/robots.txt In this I’m telling archive.org to go away and instructing all other bots to leave my stats and shit folders alone. But on 90% of my other sites it’s just a blank txt file with nothing in it.
Most bots need to be told what your page is about, and to do this you use meta tags, the most important being the title tag, which every bot will read, then you have the description and keyword tags where you can add more information on what your page is about. Then a bot is going to look at the content on a page, where content means text. So at its most basic a page would look like this http://www.baldbastard.com/shit/000.html When a bot reads your text its going to analyze the page to see if any keywords or themes are repeated and thus conclude that’s what the page is about at the most basic level.
Its more than likely that the keywords in your page are used on other websites, when people look for a search term on a search engine site they will return what they consider to be the best pages, and to do this they rank all the pages they have found with that term in them. The most common way to rank a page is to look at how many links a page has linking to it. This works backwards as they look at the page linking too you and then who’s linking to them. Thus a link to your site from a page that also has a lot of links pointing to it is considered better than a link to your site from a page that has limited or no links pointing to it. They also will look at the text in and surrounding the link to your site, since many sites linking to you will only use your domain name in the link title, it makes sense to have a key worded domain, that way links just containing your domain name will be targeted for your main keyword.
Many webmasters will try to manipulate the results of search engines and to counter this the bots will also look for indications of this manipulation. Algorithms are written into the bots to spot these, the algorithms are continuously updated, general things they will look for are: over use of keywords, different content being shown to bots and surfers, unnatural linking. Last time I heard anything it was said that Google Bot had over 30,000 of such rules.
Generally if you have great content you will have no problems getting good back links. The longer these links point to your page the more rank they will pass to it, and if the page linking to you also gets more links over time its quality will improve and this will filter down to your page.
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