Google Ranking Tips
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


the smallest to


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.”

Article source: ArticleWorld.net Free Articles

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Oct 26

Choosing a Website Designer

How do you Choose a Web Designer?
by John Sheridan

In recent years, the web design industry has experienced a growth rate of huge proportions, due entirely to the numerous companies that have appeared as a result of continued Internet expansion. The business world’s appetite for websites and ecommerce solutions show no signs of abating in the near future, and organisations and individuals who want to commission the services of a web design company are faced with a dizzying choice of options.

Companies will rightly advertise their creative skills, technical expertise and design know-how. They will use lots of technical terms and buzzwords in their marketing literature, but because of the sheer number of companies all offering more or less the same services, the point is reached where all the advertising can begin to look almost identical.

How then does one go about choosing a competent design company from the many available? If you are new to the workings of the Internet, then the most obvious and perhaps safest method is via personal recommendation, which by its very nature is a vote of confidence from a satisfied customer and presents a golden opportunity for an organisation to excel itself; after all, there is nothing like a referral to start the ego twitching and make a company go all out to impress.

An alternative method to a referral is of course to look on the Internet itself. You will find literally thousands of web designers advertising their services and at the same time providing visual proof of their abilities via their own websites. It is always a good idea to look at portfolio and testimonial pages; you can then contact one or two of their customers to get verbal references; these may help you in deciding which design company is best for you.

Another option is to choose a company at random and talk to them about what you expect from your intended website. Good designers will listen to what you have to say and work with you; they will gather as much information as possible from a customer before going anywhere near a computer. Moreover, they will always be willing to offer sound advice and will develop solutions to help bring your ideas to life.

In addition, and perhaps the smallest sector of the web design industry are the self-taught individuals who whilst having no formal training or qualifications, do possess a natural talent, aptitude and enthusiasm for web design, and who for the most part produce extremely high-quality work often at a fraction of the cost charged by the larger companies.

It is worth mentioning that there are so many capable and talented designers available, that the hardest part of getting your website built will probably be deciding which company or individual you want to do it. Taking the time to look into all the options should help to ensure that whomever you chose would produce the required result.

This article is the property of the author and may only be reproduced in its original form.

About the Author
John Sheridan is a professional proofreader of hard copy items and website copy. He also writes web copy and occasionally accepts small copy-editing assignments. He can be contacted at: john@textcorrect.co.uk website: www.textcorrect.co.uk

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Oct 25

SEO and Pro Copywriter

SEO Copywriter - Finding The Website Writer You Really Need
Search engines and the way they work are constantly evolving. What works today is ineffective or even illegal tomorrow. Writing for search engines is a skill that involves specialist and up-to-date knowledge. Here’s what to look out for if you need someone adept at search engine copywriting.

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Oct 25

A Word on Reciprical linking

Who / How to target for reciprocal links

Reciprocal linking is one of the most effective ways of driving targeted mass numbers of people to your website, however in order to be successful you’ve to carefully target and choose the sites you want to link with.

What you need to be doing is focusing on linking to similar high-traffic quality sites which will interest your visitors and which complement your site, not compete with it. Sending visitors to a competing site with a similar product is a big mistake because the chances are good that they’ll buy your their product and not yours.

Try not to down-link which is what I call it when a site links with a site with far less traffic than it. Always aim to up-link with a few high traffic sites rather than a bunch of low traffic ones. The results are much better.

My favorite and first thing to do when looking for sites to target is to try a take traffic away from my competition. I do this by visiting http://www.altavista.com or any other search engine which will tell me which sites link to which.

Imagine for example you knew your competition was www.xyz.com. You would go to Altavista and type in link:competition.com leaving out the http://www. part. To follow the above format you’d type in link:xyz.com and do the search, Altavista will return all the sites in its database that link to www.xyz.com.These are the first few sites you want to link to because you know they’re sending traffic and business to your competition and you want a piece of action too. Chances are if these sites link to your competitor they’ll link to you too.

Depending on the industry of your business and your competitor, he or she could have hundreds of links so be prepared to be held up for quite some time. It’s well worth it however because you’re effectively taking visitors away from your competitors site by having your link wherever their link is.

The next way you can target sites to link with is by visiting one of the major search sites, either Yahoo.com or Google.com. The advantage these two sites have over other search sites when it comes to targeting links is that usually results from these are of a very high standard. In Yahoo.com’s case it’s because all sites are reviewed by a human editor and in Google.com’s case it’s because they use link popularity as one of the main factors of relevancy when returning results from a search meaning only good quality sites are returned.

You’re on either Google.com or Yahoo.com, now enter keywords and keyphrases which relate to the theme of your website, remember you don’t want to link to competitive sites so try not to be too specific on your search term. If I was doing this I wouldn’t enter ‘Internet marketing articles’ because chances are most results would be competitive sites, I’d enter in ‘Internet marketing’ because it’s a wide area but still related to my website theme and not necessarily competing with me. The sites that show up for these results are prime targets. Ask for links with these guys, next you can target the guys who have links to them. The possibilities are endless.

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of AKA Marketing.com webmaster forums. Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics

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Oct 25

Traditional link exchanging is dead

Why It’s Best Avoid Reciprocal Linking These Days

Reciprocal linking is a kind of ’symbiotic relationship’ between two complementary websites. Each site has a hyperlink pointing to the other. The idea behind this is to elevate the awareness of the search engines’ to the existence of both websites’. In Google’s case, a lot of reciprocal linking could boost a site’s page rank. Even better, reciprocal linking could raise the position of that website in Google’s listings under specific keywords or phrases.

This method of website promotion worked very well, until the people behind main search engines decided that it was better for those doing a search that the search results would no longer place emphasis on reciprocally linked websites.

If you think about this carefully, it is not surprising. Why should websites that blatantly try to hoodwink the search engines get the most exposure? Just because those sites have, say, thousands of reciprocal links to other sites, does not mean that those sites are the best sites for those doing a search to be directed to.

This is probably one reason why search engines have recently changed their algorithms. Now, if a website has a one-way link coming ‘to it’ from another website, which is not reciprocated, the search engines will look favorably at that site because the linking site is saying: ‘Hey, spider! Look at this website - I totally endorse it!’

Does this mean that the person doing a search will be directed to the best top 10 sites on the web under a chosen keyword or phrase now that reciprocal linking is being ignored? It should, but the search engines may still be being hoodwinked.

Why?

Because the owner of a decent, high page rank website, might be offering a one-way link to an ‘unworthy site’ for financial gain. This means that the lesser website may appear high in the listings even though that site’s contents are not what those doing a search are looking for.

How widespread this misleading activity is remains a moot point, but the ability for unscrupulous website owners to deceive those doing a search must give the people behind the search engines cause for concern.

One day, perhaps, any form of linking may be ignored. This will help the listings to be free of malpractice and the top sites displayed will be those that finally offer real, genuine, RSS-free, relevant content. And if that content is regularly updated, so much the better.

About the author:
Victor George is a “fresh, relevant content” crusader whose web site can be found at: autopageupdate.com Other articles by Victor George can be found at: VGS Publishing

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