The CV was a pdf, and listed companies I had done work for although there was no direct link in the wording my CV obviously listed my client but also their customer mentioning no link or relationship.
I took the CV down for the sake of a quiet life, but it got me thinking why didn't my company website show up in the same search? http://www.cwebster-consulting.co.uk/. This in turn started me thinking about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), something I'd not done for a long time. It dawned on me that the last time I did anything along those lines was way back when, all you had to do was drop in the key words in the meta tag and send a cheque off to your favourite search provider!
Now though, it seems things have changed. I'm reliably informed there are “White Hat” strategies that can get you to the top of the list. There are “Black Hat” strategies that can also get you there but can also get you barred from search engines altogether. You're best going to an SEO specialist Dave Chung is one SEO Guru who can help you to get your site a more appropriate audience.
So what strategy did I use to get my CV up there in the rankings? Well, none what so ever. It was a pdf, so there was no code. There were no links (I'm not that great at creating pdf's) it was just a CV exported from Word to pdf format. It did for some reason though, satisfy whatever criteria Google use to rank web pages. I can only assume that this is simply what's in the text.
I did a little more digging and came up with Google’s rules on getting good page ranking. Some interesting things come up. For example, every web page has a reputation. Websites with a good reputation linking to other well behaved websites improve their page rankings. So don't link to iffy websites and do link to legit, nice websites and let them link to you. One of the “Black Hat” strategies is to set up a company and charge people for links to bump up their ranking. Be careful, though, if discovered this can get you banned from some sites including Google.
Nice sites that show meaningful error messages (401, 403, 404, 500 errors) instead of the default pages churned out from standard web servers rank higher. So customise your error messages and give links back to the main pages in your site from the error pages.
Only three things matter on websites, content, content, content. For your site to bump up its rankings you need to publish articles that are relevant to your business. Use Title text as though it were key word searchable. Google like to use titles as guides to what's on the site. So for example if you’re a plumber you should add an article every month on Plumbing, Plumbing techniques, Plumbing products, maybe review some equipment. This will aid the search engines indexing of your site for relevant key words in the search criteria.
Finally update regularly, most search engines throw relevance into the mix by returning sites that are regularly updated and maintained. This shows a site on the move and being kept up to date. All of which adds to relevance.
