Search Engine OptimizationKing GoogleWhat makes Google so successful? Google's Page Rank Algorithm. The algorithm considers a link a vote that your page is good. The more links (votes) you receive, the better the page. All pages begin with an equal page rank which then moves up and down based on the internal and external links to and from that page. It's important to remember that Page Rank is not the only factor involved in a search. Essentially Google completes the following steps when performing a search:
To see if your web page has been indexed by Google, use the Google toolbar's PageRank tool. When one of Google's spiders indexes your site, it takes a snap shot of what each page looks like and stores it in its cache. Page Rank is actually a measure of how likely it is that your page will be found relative to all others during a random search. Google calculates this as an integer between 1 and 2 million. This scale is then mapped to give the page rank of between 1 and 10. This means that it's not entirely accurate. Imagine that your website has a 'real' page rank of 1,000,001, and one of your competitors' page has a page rank of 1,000,000. All other things being equal, he will beat you, although both page ranks will show up as the same when scored out of 10. More Is BetterCreating more pages is the only way to create page rank. Every page on your site starts its life with the same base page rank as every other page on the web. Having more pages is better than having fewer long pages. Other ways to increases page rank are writing Blogs and by having other websites with good page rank link to you. Links cannot create page rank for you, but they can certainly move it around, including moving it to pages on other peoples websites. The Google algorithm looks at pages not domains , so there is nothing to stop your valuable page rank from being distributed around the web. The reciprocal is true too, you 'bleed' page rank from the pages that link to you. If these links are coming from another domain then that's probably good, but if the extra page rank is coming at the expense of other pages on your site, it may be bad. So you see that page rank bleed makes it vital how you handle your external links, as each one can lower the page rank of your page. There is a way to link to pages without bleeding rank. You do this by putting the 'nofollow' attribute in your link. It is probably a good idea to make all your external links nofollow, thus conserving your page rank within your site. Another possible method is to display external links as text instead of a hyper links. Given that you have a certain amount of page rank to work with, the challenge becomes to decide which pages on your site are the most important, and distribute your page rank to these pages so that they turn up in search results. A simple rule to follow here is to have lot's of links to and not many links from your important pages. Incoming ~Now that you have page rank sorted, it's time to concentrate on the other important things to worry about. Who's linking to me is an important question, and one that can be easily answered. To find out how many inbound links you have and where they're coming from, go to www.Google.com and type in "link:" then the URL of your page. Google Link doesn't list all of the links that Google knows about; only those that contribute over a certain level of Page Rank. In other words if you're getting a link from a webpage with thousands of links on it you're probably not gaining much Page Rank from them if any at all. And there's a good chance that it won't be shown using the link to functionality on Google. Odds are you'll notice that a majority of links that are coming to that page are from your own website. This highlights the notion that Page Rank is calculated on a page by page basis. Websites don't accumulate Page Rank, web pages do. Words Are KeyTried of negotiating reciprocal links? A quick and easy fix is to have the right keywords on your page. For the spider's convenience, plan your content so that all your keywords are in the first few paragraphs of every page. META TagsOne of the easiest ways to get the ball rolling with your web pages and being noticed by search engines is to use META tags. Search engines use META tags to categorize your web site's content. Search engines like Google don't give the META tags much weight when determining search engine results pages, but since using META tags is quick and easy, why not cover that base. META-DESCRIPTION tags: Search engines will often use the information in the META Description tag as well as the Title to describe your site in the short description that goes along with the link in your search engine rankings. META-KEYWORDS tag: The META keywords hold words that you can use to help search engines classify your content. The keywords you use must be relevant and must appear in the body text. Try starting with 3 to 5 'key' words from your Title and combine the words into a logical phrase as practicablly as possible. Use all lower case letters (and NO LEADING SPACES) when specifying keywords. Consistency CountsThe URL text behind your domain URL (i.e. after the .com or .com.au) should be spelled using a consistent case (upper or lower). We know that Google is case sensitive when it comes to URLs and treats webpages with the URL "www.myohmydesign.com/SEO" as different to "www.myohmydesign.com/seo". This has some pretty big implications on making sure people link to you in a consistent manner. Some capitalization rules of thumb:
Page Relevant LinksWe know that the way your inbound links are worded do make a difference, they play a crucial factor when Google searches are made by search engine users. Google uses the words between your tags to decide which websites are the most relevant to the search terms. Instead of using terms like "click here" or "link" use descriptive link tags; i.e. "For tips and tricks to increase your Google Rankings go to our Seach Engine Optimization page. Dynamic Web Sites and Friendly URLsWhile Google most certainly crawls data-driven websites, there are a few optimization considerations. The best way to get your database driven website crawled by Google is to have an index of your dynamic pages so that the Googlebots have a single point of reference to your dynamic pages. It's a slow process, but it will be well worth it. If it's too good to be true, it probably isn'tThere are many search engine optimization techniques that are quick and easy fixes, like being in a link farm. To join a link farm people pay to be in a collection of webpages where the sole purpose is to provide interconnecting links. Many of these "get ranked quick" methods have some serious repercussions. If you are caught in a link farm, or have hidden text in your pages, you'll eventually get caught and sentenced with the Google "death penalty". The sure fire way to increase your web site's Page Rank is to provide useful information to which other web sites will want to link. Many link farms, and websites that subscribe to them, have been identified and banned by Google. I Was Framed I Tell YaWebsites that use frames often don't get crawled by search engine spiders. The web was designed in such a way that every URL is supposed to correspond to a web page, and with framed websites this is not the case. We avoid frames altogether. Flasher AlertWhilst the use of Flash is becoming increasingly common as companies seek more visually enticing websites, the truth is that Flash remains invisible to most search engines. The solution to this is to have a HTML option available with the same content as the Flash site. This also helps with users that don't have Flash installed or don't want to wait for long periods of time for the page to load up. JavaScript Needs It's Own FileMany websites use JavaScript to animate menus, drop downs or mouse overs. Many search engines don't recognize JavaScript and even for those that do, if the web spiders are spending most of their time sifting through JavaScript instead of content, you risk your content not being indexed at all. We use include files in our pages. This keeps the code clean and helps search engines index pages. When JavaScript code must reside in the page, we put it at the bottom as close to the body closing tab as possible. 101k Or Less Is BestAs a general rule of thumb it's a good idea to keep your web pages down to 101k in size. More smaller pages will give you better page rank than fewer longer pages, but more importantly the Google cache only goes as high as 101k. The Google cache is a snapshot of what the webpage looked like the last time the Googlebots crawled your site. Robots.txtIf you decide to you use the redirect method when linking to external pages from your site, it's a good idea to have a robots.txt file in your root directory. In the robots.txt file you specify that the robot (a.k.a. spiders) should not look in the redirects folder. This will avoid the problem that can sometimes occur where Google will sometimes incorrectly display content from another site as if it was from your site. Also, this avoids incorrect hits on your redirects, mucking up your statistics which is one of the main reasons you would use redirects in the first place! Friendly Redirects?You don't want to give your websites Google ranking away to the redirect page when it can all go to the destination page. To avoid this, and to ensure spiders can follow the redirect, use more than a simple Response.Redirect statement. For a much more indepth discussion of SEO, please visit Sydney's Leading .NET and SQL Consultants; SSW at www.ssw.com.au from which much of this article was derived. |
