Luke Hubbard

Google Monopoly: Is it an online board game or a topic on antitrust laws? In a stroke of SEO genius, Google partners with Hasbro to release the online board game called Monopoly City Streets. Forum discussions, news results, and blog posts about the board game rise in search engine rankings, pushing other publications about “The big scary Google monopoly” aside.

Hey, would you rather read about a fun new online game or read a dry article full of antitrust talks and citations of Microsoft’s former legal issues? I actually tried brushing up on the Google antitrust issues before a meeting I had at the Google offices in NYC and I instead ended up making offers for property on Monopoly City Streets. Congratulations Google, your strategy worked… who cares about antitrust anymore… we all wanna buy more fake property!

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

This is the most important principle for creating an SEO strategy. If your website is useful and well organized, you are helping Google accomplish their mission, and thus you are more likely to gain better rankings.

If your website provides value, other websites will naturally begin to link to you. This is the reason why Google weighs so much importance on valid links in helping determine ranks.

Ask yourself, “What value will others find in my website?” Is it just a place where users are asked to immediately hand over personal information, credit card numbers, or email addresses? Does your website provide content that users will find interesting and valuable?

In summary, keep Google’s mission top of mind when fleshing out your SEO strategy. As the industry progresses, and as search engines become more sophisticated, websites that fall in line with Google’s mission will ultimately prevail in page ranks.

Search Engine Optimization, often called SEO, is the art of gaining high rankings in search engine results. Search engines rank results based on three basic principles: linking, content, and architecture.

Linking is by far the most important aspect of SEO. Gaining a link is a statement that your site provides value and someone finds it useful. If your site gets a lot of quality links, then it shows the search engines that others find your site relevant and useful. Note that a link from a high-quality website will make more of an impact on your rank than tons of links from trash sites. Also, relevancy from the linking website is also considered. For instance, since my website is generally about Internet marketing & advertising, a link from AdAge would probably impact my search engine ranking more than a link from icanhascheezburger.com.

Content is the actual text, images, videos, or whatever else that’s on the site. Obviously, strong content provides value and thus will gain links. it is important to keep content focused on an overall theme in order for robots and humans to understand what your site is about and to find it useful.

Architecture is becoming a less important part of SEO as technology evolves as it concerns both web masters and search engines. Web masters have better tools to keep their sites clean and well constructed. The search engines are becoming smarter and overcoming obstacles that used to give them problems such as identifying and reading inline frames.

One way to see how Google views the value on your site is to check its page rank, an algorithm that assigns a number value between 1-10 to web pages. You can check a website’s page rank using the tool below.

Check Page Rank of any web site pages instantly:

This free page rank checking tool is powered by Page Rank Checker service

Remember, a “10″ is a perfect score and Google doesn’t give out many of them. Check out the ranks for Google, MSN, Apple, NewYorkTimes.com, and PerezHilton.com for fun.