By Dali Singh

Having greatly benefited from my relationship with Google within the past several years, I thought I would take the opportunity to dedicate this article to the search engine superstar.

I have to be brutally honest and relay that our friendship has not always been rosy. I happen to know her, (Google), several years back, when she was just a small fish in a big pond. I started to analyze her every move and realized that she is a fickle, clever, and extremely mysterious being. Regardless of her ways, I decided to be more acquainted. Here are a few things I learned along the way:

When it comes to logic, she is the queen.

In other words, avoid participating in anything that may blacklist you from this search engine, including keyword stuffing, link farms, and hosting 50 "sister" sites on the same server. Keyword stuffing does not simply refer to the content of your site, but also within the alt tags, headers, URLs and any additional areas of your web site.

She likes to stay focused.

When optimizing the individual pages of your web site, try to hone in on 1-2 relevant keywords per web page. Analyze each page and identify which keyword would be most suitable. If you decide to optimize for two keywords per page, make sure they are similar in context. For example, if you are optimizing for the key phrase "insurance leads", you may also consider optimizing for "insurance sales leads" within the same page.

She loves to travel.

Google loves links, whether they are inbound or outbound. Lots of research has focused on inbound links, but little has focused on the number of links on an actual page. Google has not published this theory in the academic papers; it appears that Google favors sites with several internal and outbound links over pages without links. If you have any doubts about this theory, simply do a search on any high volume keyword or phrase within this search engine, and analyze the first few sites that come up. Notice how the majority of them have numerous internal links on the main pages of their web site.

She is in popular demand and expects the same from you.

The more popular your site is across the Web, the more Google will favor you. Obviously, having several high quality inbound links to your site is key in achieving higher rankings. When identifying web sites for inbound links, target the ones that are highly relevant to your site. For example, if you run a jewelry site, look for websites that are purely informational on the topic of jewelry or gemstones. Also, make sure that the sites you decide to collaborate with have a good PageRank (at least a 5) and online presence.

To save yourself a lot of hassle, conduct a keyword search relevant to your business and target the web sites that show up on the 1st and 2nd pages (weeding out the competition) of Google. Contact the webmasters of those sites, tell them about your company, and find useful ways to compensate them for adding your company's information on their site. If you have an affiliate program, do not be shy to pitch it. If you have an online advertising budget, offer them a Pay Per Click deal or monthly advertising fee for promoting your web site. Please note that collaborating with these sites or purchasing ads should complement your overall marketing & business development strategy and not be useful for getting link value.

She gets bored easily

Regardless of whether your site is informational, e-commerce, or just a sophisticated version of a business card, having quality content is crucial. Adding to that factor is how often you update your site's content.

If you run a site that has new content added on a daily basis then eventually the Google "freshbot" will start visiting your site on a daily basis and indexing your new content into the database (hence the popularity of blogs). When you update content, Google will visit your site and index it quicker.

If you have not already noticed, keeping pace with Google is not an easy undertaking. It takes a certain level of knowledge, skill and creativity to truly benefit from this relationship. The rest is up to the stars.

Dali Singh is the managing director for Blueliner Marketing (www.bluelinermarketing.com), a full service marketing and Internet consultancy specializing in internet marketing and web site promotion strategies, public relations, and corporate branding.