Google Ranking Tips
Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters alike.
David Callan
Surfers like it
because of the highly relevant results it gives and the speed at which it
delivers them. This is due to its complex text matching algorithm and of
course the Pagerank™ system that this engine uses. More on the Pagerank™
system later.
Google is popular
with webmasters and Internet marketing companies due to the highly workable
ranking system it uses.
Unlike other engines where information
about how the results are obtained are sketchy at best, Google actually
publishes information on its site about the results it produces. Hence webmasters
have things they can do to produce higher rankings.
What also makes Google popular
with webmasters is the speed at which they will spider and list your site.
If you're not listed in Google and submit your URL you're usually indexed
within two weeks. If however your site is already listed in the index Google
should reindex once every month, but more frequently if you've a high Pagerank™.
This indexing
and reindexing time is much quicker than most other search engines. This
allows webmasters to edit their pages properties such as title, first few
lines of text, headings, keyword distribution and of course the number of
incoming links to their site. They can then discover quickly if the changes
they made were successful or not.
It's because of
this popularity that you need to know the workings of the Google search engine.
Without knowledge of it you'll be ranked lower than all other sites that
are only slightly familiar with the Google algorithm and hence could
lose lots of potential customers.
Google ranking algorithm
Let's now continue onto the
main part of this Google rankings report by indulging ourselves in
the Google ranking algorithm. Well there are two main parts to the algorithm
Google uses, the first is its text matching system whereby Google tries
to find pages relevant to what the searcher has entered in the search box.
The second and equally important part of the algorithm is of course the
Google patented Pagerank™ system.
I'll first go through how to
make your pages relevant by discussing the text matching part of the algorithm.
Google gives a
lot of "weight" to the title tag when searching for keywords. It
is therefore vital to make sure your most important keywords or keyphrases
appear within this tag. It seems to work best if you've other words in your
title tag too after your keywords, but try to remain under 35-40 characters.
I imagine many of you know this
already but Google does not use meta tags such as the keywords meta tag
or the description meta tag. This is because the text within these tags
can't be seen by visitors to a website. Therefore Google feels these tags
will be abused by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words in them in
order to get more visitors.
This lack of support
for meta tags means that Google creates your description from the first few
lines of text on your page. This in turn means that you've to have your keywords
and phrases right at the top of your webpage, if Google finds them your page
becomes more relevant, if however it doesn't find them the rest of your page
has to work harder to become relevant. To see an example of what I mean scroll
back to the top of this page and you'll notice keyword rich wording similar
to:
Google
submitting tips, ranking high at google.com, Google ranking tips, pagerank
algorithm, Google algorithm guide.
The above text
includes keywords and keyphrases related to the theme of this page. Now
when people search for any of those keywords or keyphrases this page is
much more likely to be near the top of the results than a page that doesn't
imply this technique.
Google considers keyword density
in the body of a page for determining relevancy too, so make sure your keywords
and phrases appear a couple of times throughout the whole page. Don't go
overboard though, a density of 6-10% seems to work best.
Google has recently
been noticed to give a substantial amount of "weight" to words
appearing between the various header tags. These are tags designed to help
you split up sections of your page, so this approach by Google seems to make
sense. The header tags go from h6 the smallest to h1 the
biggest, the bigger the heading tag the more relevent your page will become
for the words within it. It is for this reason that you should always try
to have your most important words within these tags as often as possible
throughout your page.
Other advice about making your
page relevant would be to make as many keywords appear within bold
tags as you can. In the past Google has been known to index text in alt
image tags, whether they still do or not I don't know but it couldn't hurt
to include keywords in these tags anyway.
One final tip on page relevancy
is the point on having your keywords and phrases in links which point
to your site. It's a good idea to have the linking text contain your
keywords as Google even says itself in its description of its Pagerank
technology that it analyzes pages that links come from.
How much keyword laden
links matter is anyone's guess. I have however noticed a lot of sites
which give the HTML code to visitors who want to exchange links do
include keywords in the actual linking area. You should do this too
on your links page, say something like "if you want to link to
this site, please use the following code". The code would of
course have your most important words in the actual link text and
your less important words in the accompanying description of your
site.
Google Pagerank
In the above section of
the article you've learned what areas Google uses and looks at when
looking for a relevant site, but what method does Google use to determine
which site is better, the answer is the Pagerank system.
Pagerank is as the name
suggests a ranking system of pages. It works on the basis that if
a website ABC.COM has been linked from a website XYZ.COM, abc.com
must have some good content and therefore Google will count the link
from XYZ.COM as a vote for ABC.COM. You can check your Pagerank on
Google by downloading the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com
The Pagerank™ scale
goes from 1 to 10 on the Google toolbar and from 1 to 7 beside listings
in the Google directory. A less important site is of course a site
with a PR of 1 and a very very important site is a site with a PR
of 7 or 10, in the directory or toolbar respectively.
The more links or votes
a site has the more important it must be and therefore the higher
it will rank for search words which it is relevant to, right?, WRONG!.
Google does not simply
count the number of incoming links a page has, if that was the case
every webmaster from Iceland to Vietnam would try and exchange links
to every Tom, Dick and Harry website that would let them. In Googles
own words:
"Google
looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives;
it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that
are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to
make other pages "important."
Hopefully your beginning
to get the idea. The idea is to have your page linked to by as many
high quality and high pageranked sites as possible. Right? RIGHT and
WRONG.
WRONG BECAUSE, you see
the Google Pagerank system also takes into account the number
of links the page that has linked to you has. The reasoning for this
is that a page X has a certain amount of voting PR, if your site Y
is the only link from that page X, then Google feels confident that
page X thinks your page Y is the best link it has and will give you
more PR. If however page X has 50 links, page X could think your only
the 50th best link. Hence the more links a page has the less of a
PR boost your site will get.
RIGHT BECAUSE, linking
to a site with a 6+ PR will provide a significant boost to your PR
in most cases, but in cases where the site also links with 100 other
sites the boost will be almost zero. Likewise if a site has a PR of
just 2 but you and only one other site are linked from it, then the
PR boost would be more than the site with 100 links and a PR of 6.
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