The key to popularity on the internet is to befriend the ever-popular Google. Unlike most friends, Google provides a clear and concise methodology to achieving said goal. Google bases its friendships off of two metrics, text matching and PageRanking.

Google takes the relatively simple concept of text matching to a new level. Google assigns different values depending on the location of the text inside the website. For instance, matching the search query against text in the title or in the website address itself will produce a much higher ranking than text located in the footer of the site. Also, Google is quite shallow; Google only looks skin-deep to the text visible to the user. Long gone are the days of meta-keywords and hiding text behind backgrounds to score a few more points.

Google's PageRanking, named after co-founder Larry Page, factors popularity through association. The more websites that refer to your website and vice versa, the more popular you're website will be in the eyes of Google. To avoid web-based boiler rooms, Google also looks at the quality of the referring websites; imaginary friends don't count. As all contests involve politics, some votes are worth more than others.

Google even provides a friendship for-hire service called Google AdWords. For a reasonable cost-per-click, Google will post your advertisements on their search results page.

If your business wants to participate in Google's Popularity Contest, give Gartman Technical Services a call and we will help you out.