Thomas Nixon wrote on his Small Press Blog about doing “The Google Push” - essentially his name for optimizing a web site for specific search terms in Google.

While the concept is nothing new (the whole search engine optimization industry is based on doing just what Tom describes), he’s right in that you should start this type of work before the book comes out. However, Tom makes it sound simpler than it is by glossing over a swath of things necessary for it to work.

First, just building a site is no guarantee Google will even index it. Google discovers new sites primarily by finding links to them on other sites already in Google’s index. The idea behind this is that sites considered to be good resources only link to other sites if they are also good resources. So, before you go near Google, you need to spend time getting links to your site from other sites considered authorities on a particular topic. You can identify the authoritative sites by using Technorati, a search engine that indexes blog posts. Just plug the search term you are looking for into Technorati and sort the results by authority (using the option at the top of the page).

Second, you need to refine the phrases for which you are optimizing. By one recent estimate, Google has about 25 billion pages in its index. There is no way to come up within the first couple of pages of results for common phrases. So you need to write content for narrowly-defined subjects, preferably ones that aren’t covered adequately on other sites. (I’ve written about how to align your content with what people are searching for in previous articles.)

And finally, because Google has 25 billion pages of content (with more coming in each day), you may be able to get to the top of the search results list for a while, but it won’t last. Someone will unseat you. Remember Google is just one source of traffic. You want to do all you can to optimize your content for Google, but don’t fret over it. The better strategy is to diversify your sources of traffic.

Focus on producing good content, the rest will follow.