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Google ranking tips - Page 1
By David Callan
Google is by far the most popular search engine
available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters
alike.
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 <b> 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.
To discuss your requirements
further, please feel free to
contact us at any time. We would be delighted to
offer our best to you. |
