GOOGLE OPTIMIZATION TIPS
Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for bothordinary surfers and webmasters alike. Surfers like it because of the highlyrelevant results it gives and the speed at which it delivers them. This is dueto its complex text matching algorithm and of course the Pagerank™ system thatthis engine uses. More on the Pagerank™ system later.
Google is popular with webmasters and Internet marketing companies due tothe highly workable ranking system it uses. Unlike other engines where informationabout how the results are obtained are sketchy at best, Google actuallypublishes information on its site about the results it produces. Hencewebmasters have things they can do to produce higher rankings.
What also makes Google popular with webmasters is the speed at which theywill spider and list your site. If you're not listed in Google and submit yourURL you're usually indexed within two weeks. If however your site is alreadylisted in the index Google should reindex once every month, but more frequentlyif you've a high Pagerank™.
This indexing and reindexing time is much quicker than most other searchengines. This allows webmasters to edit their pages properties such as title,first few lines of text, headings, keyword distribution and of course thenumber of incoming links to their site. They can then discover quickly if thechanges they made were successful or not.
It's because of this popularity that you need to know the workings of theGoogle search engine. Without knowledge of it you'll be ranked lower than allother sites that are only slightly familiar with the Google algorithm and hencecould lose lots of potential customers.
Google ranking algorithm
Let's now continue onto the main part of this Google rankings report byindulging ourselves in the Google ranking algorithm. Well there are two mainparts to the algorithm Google uses, the first is its text matching systemwhereby Google tries to find pages relevant to what the searcher has entered inthe search box. The second and equally important part of the algorithm is ofcourse the Google patented Pagerank™ system.
I'll first go through how to make your pages relevant by discussing the textmatching part of the algorithm.
Google gives a lot of "weight" to the title tag when searching forkeywords. It is therefore vital to make sure your most important keywords orkeyphrases appear within this tag. It seems to work best if you've other wordsin your title tag too after your keywords, but try to remain under 35-40characters.
I imagine many of you know this already but Google does not use meta tagssuch as the keywords meta tag or the description meta tag. This is because thetext within these tags can't be seen by visitors to a website. Therefore Googlefeels these tags will be abused by webmasters placing lots of unrelated wordsin them in order to get more visitors.
This lack of support for meta tags means that Google creates yourdescription from the first few lines of text on your page. This in turn meansthat 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'tfind them the rest of your page has to work harder to become relevant. To seean example of what I mean scroll back to the top of this page and you'll noticekeyword 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 thispage. Now when people search for any of those keywords or keyphrases this pageis much more likely to be near the top of the results than a page that doesn'timply this technique.
Google considers keyword density in the body of a page for determiningrelevancy too, so make sure your keywords and phrases appear a couple of timesthroughout the whole page. Don't go overboard though, a density of 6-10% seemsto work best.
Google has recently been noticed to give a substantial amount of"weight" to words appearing between the various header tags. Theseare tags designed to help you split up sections of your page, so this approachby Google seems to make sense. The header tags go from <h6> the smallestto <h1> the biggest, the bigger the heading tag the more relevent yourpage will become for the words within it. It is for this reason that you shouldalways try to have your most important words within these tags as often aspossible throughout your page.
Other advice about making your page relevant would be to make as manykeywords appear within bold <b> tags as you can. In the past Google hasbeen known to index text in alt image tags, whether they still do or not Idon'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 andphrases in links which point to your site. It's a good idea to have the linkingtext contain your keywords as Google even says itself in its description of itsPagerank technology that it analyzes pages that links come from.
How much keyword laden links matter is anyone's guess. I have howevernoticed a lot of sites which give the HTML code to visitors who want toexchange links do include keywords in the actual linking area. You should dothis too on your links page, say something like "if you want to link tothis site, please use the following code". The code would of course haveyour most important words in the actual link text and your less important wordsin the accompanying description of your site.
Google Pagerank
In the above section of the article you've learned what areas Google uses andlooks at when looking for a relevant site, but what method does Google use todetermine which site is better, the answer is the Pagerank system.
Pagerank is as the name suggests a ranking system of pages. It works on thebasis that if a website ABC.COM has been linked from a website XYZ.COM, abc.commust have some good content and therefore Google will count the link fromXYZ.COM as a vote for ABC.COM. You can check your Pagerank on Google bydownloading the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com
The Pagerank™ scale goes from 1 to 10 on the Google toolbar and from 1 to 7beside listings in the Google directory. A less important site is of course asite with a PR of 1 and a very very important site is a site with a PR of 7 or10, in the directory or toolbar respectively.
The more links or votes a site has the more important it must be andtherefore 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, ifthat was the case every webmaster from
"Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links apage receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast bypages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help tomake other pages "important."
Hopefully your beginning to get the idea. The idea is to have your pagelinked 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 accountthe number of links the page that has linked to you has. The reasoning for thisis that a page X has a certain amount of voting PR, if your site Y is the onlylink from that page X, then Google feels confident that page X thinks your pageY is the best link it has and will give you more PR. If however page X has 50links, page X could think your only the 50th best link. Hence the more links apage has the less of a PR boost your site will get.
RIGHT BECAUSE, linking to a site with a 6+ PR will provide a significantboost to your PR in most cases, but in cases where the site also links with 100other sites the boost will be almost zero. Likewise if a site has a PR of just2 but you and only one other site are linked from it, then the PR boost wouldbe more than the site with 100 links and a PR of 6.
Google Pagerank formula
It's beginning to come complex isn't it, just wait till you see this formula.It looks scary for non math's people.
First let me explain what the damping factor is. The damping factor is theamount of your PR which you can actually pass on when you vote / link toanother site. The damping factor is widely known to be .85, this is a littleless then the linking pages own PR.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
In layman's terms PR(A) is the Pagerank boost your page A will get afterbeing linked from someone else's site (t1). PR(t1) is the pagerank of the pagewhich links to you and C(t1) is the amount of total links that (t1) has. It isimportant to know that a pages voting power is only .85 of that pages actual PRand this voting power gets spread out evenly between all sites it links to.
Imagine http://www.akamarketing.com was linked by XYZ.COM's link page whichhad a PR of 4 and 9 other links, here's how the formula should look like:
PR(AKA) = (1-.85) + .85*(4/10)
PR(AKA) = .15 + .85*(.4)
PR(AKA) = .15 + .34
PR(AKA) = .49
To sum up my site would get an injection of .49 PR after being linked from apage with a PR of four and 9 other links.
Let's say I was linked from a site with a PR of 8, double the previousexample's amount, which had 15 other links, a total of 16 outbound links, myboost would be:
PR(AKA) = (1-.85) +.85*(8/16)
PR(AKA) = .15 + .85(.5)
PR(AKA) = .15 + .425
PR(AKA) = .575
The above two worked examples show that not only is the PR of the linkingpage important but what is also important is how many other sites are alsolinked to from that page.
I think we've had enough maths stuff for now, just remember that the name ofthe game is to get as many links from pages with high PR and few other links.The more of these links you get the more your PR will grow and the more yourrankings will improve for your relevant keywords.
Google Pagerank™ and web directories
The best thing you can do for your PR seems at the moment seems to be gettinglisted in Dmoz.org. Dmoz.org is home to the Open Directory Project which is ahuman compiled directory of websites.
Pagerank™ is widely known to be biased towards big name directories such asDmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.
This is true, especially in the case of Dmoz.org. These ODP links aretreated like gold by the Pagerank™ system. It doesn't even matter what theindividual PR of the category page is. I have seen sites gain a large PR booston the toolbar as soon as Google updates its directory with the latest one fromDmoz.org. This is because Google uses its own version of the ODP for the Googleweb directory.
Don't believe ODP links are very important to Pagerank™?
Don't believe a listing in the ODP will boost your ranking?
Well they are and it will. Perform a search for almost anything on Googleand you'll discover that 75-80% of the top 10 results are also indexed in theGoogle directory and therefore also listed on Dmoz.org. The fact of the matterseems to me to be if your not listed with the ODP, you shouldn't expect muchtraffic from Google.
Getting a listing is not difficult, it does sometimes take time but it's notdifficult. Just make sure your site has good content and follow the guidelinesfor adding a URL. Try to get your index page listed at least. I say at leastbecause although ODP claims only to list your index page, there are plenty ofsites with 5 - 10 pages listed.
Therefore if your site has very distinctive sections you can submit eachsection, beware though that this must be done slowly, otherwise you may bebanned from the directory altogether for spamming. Once Google updates itsdirectory these listings could do wonders for your sites Pagerank™. My articleentitled Open Directory Project guide is a complete guide to getting into theODP, I highly recommend you read it.
Regarding Yahoo and Looksmart, Pagerank™ will usually allocate a more thannormal amount of PR boost for any sites listed. Tips on getting listed in Yahoocan be read in Yahoo submitting tips.
If you're a non-commercial site or have a site that's almost completelynon-commercial you can get into the Looksmart directory throughhttp://www.zeal.com. I really love this site, just like Google obtains its directoryresults from ODP, Looksmart obtains its non-commercial listings from the Zealweb directory. Without Zeal I would have to fork out hard earned cash and allmy site does is provide free information in the form of articles and tutorials.
To continue, I submitted AKA Marketing.com on a Tuesday and was listed inZeal by Thursday morning. On Monday I checked my logs and found lots ofreferrals from Looksmart, I was in Looksmart already. I looked at my logs lateronly to find MSN had updated its database from the Looksmart database and wassending me loads of visitors because of the good listing I got. My site waslisted in Zeal, Looksmart and MSN within six days. Needless to say I highlyrecommend you get over to Zeal.com and submit your site.
Before you can submit a site however you must pass a member quiz, the quizis a fairly simple straightforward one, you might however learn a thing or twowhile doing it.
If you happen to be a webmaster that has a listing in all three of Dmoz.org,Yahoo and Looksmart then I'm guessing your site has good to very good PR andrankings.
Google ranking tips - Conclusion
In closing I would like to recap on some of the main points you have just read.Be sure to have your main keywords and keyphrases in your title tag and wellspread throughout your page, use header tags wherever possible. Get as manylinks from as many high PR low number of outbound links pages as you can. Getlisted with Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.
Well that's it. I hope you have enjoyed reading this Google Ranking tipsarticle as much as I have enjoyed researching and writing it. I also hope thatyou can put this advice into use and help get yourself some real traffic.
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