SEO is far less complicated than most SEO specialists would like you to believe, and here is living proof of a real working example.

If you do a search on Google for the term “Failure” or “Miserable failure” you will find a rather interesting result on the first page under the first result on Google.

So why does this happen?

The reason why George W. Bush’s website shows up under the first search on Google, under the term “failure” is due to a ranking alogortythim (or equation if you like) that basically takes all the inbound links (links from other websites pointing to a website) and reads those inbounds links as a vote.

Right, so what does this all mean in English… The Internet is considered to be a democratic state, where all votes from other websites count towards the popularity the website to which those links point.

In other words if I have 100 sites linking into me, I have a greater chance of ranking higher than a website that say only has 50 other sites linking to them.

Further more, what those other sites “SAY” about your website determines which keywords or terms you rank for… in this case obviously many links point to George W. Bush’s website with the term failure in the content and context of those links…

And Bingo… you have democracy online!

It is also its worth noting that Google really has no option but to keep the computer generated results in this case. If they decided to manually edit the result, this would fly in the face of their own democratic ranking system.

So what can we learn form this little example?

There are two major search engine optimisation lessons to be learnt here:

1. Inbound links are REALLY important
2. What those inbound links say about your website is REALLY important

So if you want to rank highly for a term, get allot of quality one way inbound links to your website with your keywords in the anchor text.

Good luck and Happy Marketing.