10 Truths About Better Google Rankings

10 Truths About Better Google Rankings

By: Kevin Gallagher, Wed Aug 22nd, 2007

Introduction

I have read a lot of articles over the years telling me how to get better rankings in Google. Some of these articles where full of good advice and some where not. Here you will find insightful truths about getting better rankings in Google that I personally have found to be true after years of research.

1. The Quick solution

First the bad news, unfortunately there are no quick fixes in creating higher rankings in Google. You have to have a lot of patience in the search engine optimization game. It will take months for your tiresome efforts to come to fruition. That’s why it’s important to get things right from the start and plan out your strategy.

2. Keyword Research

Keywords are the most important part of search engine optimization. You must do your keyword research before starting your website if you can, as this will form the basis of all your search engine optimization.

There is no point going for broad keywords for example ” website design” as there is too much competition for those keywords and you will find very difficult if not impossible to reach the top spot in Google. You are much better using long tail niche keywords. They will have a smaller search volume, but it will be easier to obtain top position.

People are more likely to find what they are looking for with long tail keywords, for example if someone needs a website they may type into Google ” web design” and visit a few websites. They may then discover they also need hosting and a domain name. They will then do another search for “website design hosting and domain name services” for example, and this may be your niche keyword or key phrase. How do you find keywords that people are searching for? Well a good free tool can be found at http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/ or if you want something more professional you can use http://www.wordtracker.com/ an excellent service for finding niche keywords. You should try and get at least 10 keyword phrases.

Once you have found your keywords do a search with them on Google. First of all look at how many results there are. If it’s in its millions them maybe your keywords are not that good and would be too competitive. If you can find keywords with results at about 50,000 then you could be onto a winner.

You should also check out your competition. Click on the top result for your keyword in the SERPS (search engine results pages) and check out their page rank. This will give you a rough idea of what you need to achieve to get top placement. Also you should check to see how many links they have pointing to their website as this will also give you a rough idea of how many links you will need to get to the top position. To do this in the search box type link:followed by the full url and you will get a list of websites that link to that domain but it’s a good idea to do this in the Yahoo search engine as they give a more extensive list of back links. Google will only show you a percentage of their links, usually of page rank 3 or higher. Remember these are only rough estimates as every website is different and less, more relevant links will achieve better results.

3. Optimizing Meta title tag

Google sees the title tag as the most important and relevant part of the web page it retrieves. This is one of the few things you have any control over in Google’s search results. The title tag is the underlined header for your result in the SERPS, it also appears at top of your browser window. Keep this descriptive and readable, but at the same time include your newly found niche keywords. Google will also highlight the keywords in your title that where included in the search query.

4. Optimizing Meta description tag

The description tag is the description of the web page, which resides under the title tag in the results. Again use your keywords in here, maybe some of the lesser ones you discovered. This is the only other part of the results you have any control over. Google will also highlight the keywords in here that match the search query. Again remember to keep it descriptive and readable.

5. Domain names

If you can, try and include your main keywords in your domain name, as Google will highlight them when they match the search query. This can give your ranking a little boost as this will show that your website is relevant to the search query.

6. The open directory project (DMOZ)

You should always submit your website to DMOZ as it can take an age to get listed in here and Google uses these results in its organic results sometimes. I recently wrote an article discussing this topic and some people commented on this and said that they haven’t submitted to DMOZ and their

7. The importance of Content

Content is very important. If you have ever changing fresh unique content on your website relating to your topic Google will love you for it and other websites will link to you. In return this will increase your rankings, but you should really be doing this anyway. A website with no changing content is a dead website. Your content should contain your keywords, but don’t spam your content with your keywords. Use them at the start and end of your web page and sprinkle them in-between. Also use them in your header text and even bold a few as this shows Google that these words bear more importance.

8. Page rank the green menace

Why are people so obsessed with that little green bar on the Google tool bar? Well I’m here to tell you that you can stop obsessing about it right now. The thing about the page rank bar is it can be at least 3 months out of date as Google only updates it in roughly a 3-month cycle. Only Google knows your true pagerank, which changes all the time. Google regularly spiders your website and scans for new content and links to show the most relevant content in its results. Therefore page rank is pretty inaccurate. The only advantage of that green bar that I can see is for exchanging links. You can get a rough idea what a websites ranking is and you can decide whether or not to exchange links.

The other thing people get confused about is that it’s called pagerank not siterank. What I have determined is that your website will get assigned a page rank figure and then it will be distributed through your indexed pages, for example if your website gets a figure of 5 then your home page may get a page rank of 3 and your other pages get a 2 or maybe a 1 and so on. If these other pages also have links to them this will increase their own individual page rank.

9. Linking

Reciprocal links are easier to come by but in the early stages when you don’t have a good page rank will be more difficult. Once your page rank increases you can be more selective of the pagerank you exchange with. One-way links are better than 2 way links but one-way links can be harder to obtain. Why should someone put your link on their website, what’s in it for them? You can do this by writing articles like this one, and submitting it to article websites, social media websites or on your own blog, but remember to include an author’s bio including some links to your website. Don’t forget about the guys starting out when your green bar starts to increase. If they have a website with good quality content then you should consider linking with them. Remember we all need to start somewhere and page rank of 1 is tomorrow’s page rank 5. Try and keep your link to relevant websites as Google likes this and you will receive quality traffic from these websites for years to come. Also I have found a great little tool to check if your potential link partners are linking to bad neighborhoods, which Google may penalize you for linking to. The address is:

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

rankings are fine. This may be true but one thing you should remember is that lots of directory websites use DMOZ results, which in turn will get you more one-waylinks.

10. Blogging

Blogs are loved by Google as they have lots of text and are constantly getting updated, so start your own blog on your website. Include articles, stories and any thing that’s related to your website. If you give people something of interest they will come back for more and link to you. That’s all for now, take care and good luck! And remember you only get out of something what you put in to it.
About the Author

Kevin Gallagher is the managing director of Umbrella a custom website design company in the Scottish Borders providing small business website design , website builder software

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Free Ads Secret — How To Get Free Traffic Fast on Google

Free Ads Secret — How To Get Free Traffic Fast on Google

By: Bob Douglas, Tue Nov 13th, 2007

Yes, it is possible for the ‘little guy’ to attract lots of free traffic fast from the undisputed giant of all search engines. In this short article, I’ll share a few simple ideas for getting free traffic from Google within just days — and with a minimum amount of work.

Step number one is to optimize your site according to Google’s preferences. Keep in mind that Google wants sites that create a good experience for the user. That is… sites that provide the most relevant and compatible information to the keywords used in the search.

So you need to position each page on your site to be an ideal fit for those specific keywords, in order to consistently show up on the front page of search results. Use the keywords in your title tag, your page headline, your keyword tag and a few times throughout your page. Make it fit smoothly, rather than appear shoe-horned in. If possible, set your exact keyword phrase in bold. Do this for each individual page on your site.

Capitalize on the content you place on other sites. That’s another free ads secret. Link to your page in forum posts, in your email signature file, as well as in the resource box of any articles you write and post on other websites.

A top article directory like GoArticles.com is considered a top “authority site” and posting there automatically gives you a shot at a premier position at Google and other engines when you follow this technique accordingly.

Create separate articles to post on your website. Avoid using strictly landing pages and sales pages. Remember: free traffic from Google is dependent upon you giving the searcher something relevant and of value. That’s where targeted articles come into play in a big way. Give first and get the sale later. Target different keyword phrases and write separate articles for your site. That’s the way to attract qualified prospects in larger numbers.

Keep upgrading your content. Add fresh new material regularly. Continue to optimize each page you add and you’ll see your search listings improve dramatically, sometimes in just a couple of days. The more active you are in following these free ad secret steps, the more they’ll pay off by bringing you consistent traffic.
About the Author

Bob Douglas writes about making money online. Have you heard about the Google free click formula? Here’s a step-by-step blueprint to attract literally millions of cash-paying visitors to your affiliate product page –without paying a dime in advertising. Click Here To Get The Inside Scoop Instantly

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Seven Ways to Improve your Click-through Rate

Seven Ways to Improve your Click-through Rate

By: Justin Palmer, Wed Nov 14th, 2007

Getting into the top 10 Google results is only half the battle. How does your search result fare against the other SERP real estate? Here’s some simple tips I’ve gathered to help make your listing stand out.

Questions: Try using an intriguing question to spark the interest of the user. Questions leave people hanging, wanting to know more. If you ask the right question, your result will hopefully be clicked. page rank offers some good thoughts on using questions in your title tag.

Keyword Dividers: If your title tag consists of several keywords, consider separating them by something more attention grabbing than commas. I frequently use double colons (::), the vertical bar( | ), or caret symbols ( >> ).

Short Titles: If you don’t care about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your title tag, consider shortening your title in order to make it stand out. Short titles are very scan-able

Company Name in Tag: The question about whether or not to include your company’s name in the title tag is a topic of much debate. If your brand name is well recognized, you could benefit from the additional trust implicit in the name. If not, you may simply be distracting from more important keywords and wasting valuable real estate.

Short URLs: Get Elastic shares some interesting data from Marketing Sherpa that suggests shorter URL’s increase click-through since they do not distract from the more important page title. While there may not be much you can do about the length of your domain, you may want to shorten your page files names.

Keyword in URL or Page File Names: This tactic is frequently used in Pay Per Click ads. By creating page file names with keywords in them, you make your listing appear more relevant. However, you may want to balance this tactic with the one above by not making unnecessarily long URL’s.

Indented Listings: Recently, I posted on creating indented search results. In addition to doubling your SERP real estate, and indented result creates a great visual marker that sets your listing apart.

Move higher: This seems like a no-brainer, but often we forget how much more clickable the number 1 spot is over number 2. Moving up a few results can have an exponential effect on your click-through rate.

Not every suggestion here will work for everyone. Be sure to test these tactics on less important pages, and then analyze the results. The key is to stand apart from your competition. If all top positions are using Questions in the title tag, you’re better off doing something else.

Justin Palmer is the website administrator for C28.com, which sells Christian T-shirts. Justin also writes an eCommerce and SEO blog, covering topics such as marketing with Street Teams and SEO metrics.

About the Author

Justin Palmer writes an eCommerce Marketing blog (http://www.palmerwebmarketing.com)

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and website at Lake Tahoe Enterprise

Keyword Analysis Research – Making Your Words Pay In A Big Way

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Keyword Analysis Research – Making Your Words Pay In A Big Way

By: Bob Douglas, Wed Nov 14th, 2007

Keyword analysis research is necessary to get maximum quality exposure from the big search engines like Google.

Ultimately what you want is to assemble a collection of targeted keywords that convert web visitors into cash-spending customers. That’s the goal of effective search engine optimization and keyword analysis research leads you to the best, most lucrative keywords and phrases.

In search engine optimization, keyword analysis research allows you to figure out which targeted keywords you should be using, and which ones are best left alone. In a perfect world, you’d want numerous relevant keywords with huge marketplace demand and very little competition. That’s the ideal, but even a couple of powerful word combinations can give you a steady flow of high-grade search engine traffic.

When selling products online from your site, your best bet is to select keywords and phrases that bring in customers – instead of tire kickers.

This is where your keyword analysis research comes into play. General search terms attract large numbers of people, but few customers. But narrower, more specific terms tend to draw lower overall numbers, but a much higher percentage of them are ready to buy now.

Specific, long tail keyword terms attract less competition. Those who do visit are better qualified and more likely to buy. You’ll get fewer searches with longer keyword phrases, but it helps weed out info seekers while drawing in customers.

Employ chosen keywords throughout your pages, making sure they fit well within the text. You’ll also want to limit the use of these words to no more than 5% of the total count.

If you want to find multiple relevant keywords, with little competition, then a keyword analysis tool is suggested. You can do it manually, but it’s tiresome and probably not the best use of your time.
About the Author

If you’re serious about using keywords to make more money online, here’s the most powerful, robust, fully-automated keyword software program ever created. For complete details and to claim your valuable free report (worth $47) Click Here And Make Your Keywords Pay Off Big Time

5 Tips On How To Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rates

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5 Tips On How To Increase Your Landing Page Conversion Rates by Serge Dandelin

Increasing your landing page conversion rates is very important. However, before we can talk about how to improve your landing page conversion, you have to know what a landing page is and how it can help to increase your sales. The landing page is the page that people land on after clicking on one of your ads.

It’s very important once they get to this page that they like what they see. Most of the time you can either grab them in the first few seconds or lose them. Your landing page is by far the back bone of your whole Internet marketing plan. Without a good landing page, you are going to be doomed to fail from the start. No matter how good your ad is or your product is, not having a good landing page is going to kill your business and customers. Now that you know what it is, we are going to talk about five ways that you can improve your landing page conversion.

First of all, whenever you place an ad, you want the ad to be linked to your landing page. The first thing that you are going to want on your landing page is to have it look very appealing to the eye! When they see your page, you want them to be hooked and not ever want to leave from there. The next thing that you are going to want is to get rid of a lot of the text. Sure you are going to want some, but you have to remember that most people just skip through a wall of text.

Ensure you have included a call to action towards the top of the page. There should be calls to action sprinkled throughout the remainder of your landing page content as different people have different tipping points in the sales process. Your sentences should be brief or dot-points.

So too much text just turns people off. Next, you are going to want to make sure that you have color and pictures, but you do not want too much. You want to make sure that you get a good vibe from your site, but at the same time, too much color or too many pictures will just scare them away. After that, you are going to want to make sure you only have one link on your page, and that is going to be the link to get into your main site.

You do not want people straying off on your home page to different places. Last, but not least, if you have any success stories that people have sent you, you may want to place them on your front landing page. People like to hear that the product they are about to use is being praised.

Having a great landing page is very important to the success of your online business. If you want everything to run smoothly and capture the sales you are going to want to make sure your landing page is a good one.

To Your Success!

Article Source:http://www.isnare.com

Do you want to learn more about Internet Marketing? I have just completed my brand new guide to Search Engine Marketing Success: ”How To Consistently Drive Thousands Of Targeted Visitors With Search Engine Optimization”. Download it free here: Search Engine Optimization Success. Serge Daudelin Affordable Search Engine Optimization Services.com. Serge Daudelin is a Search Engine Optimization specialist and consultant who has written over 300 articles in print and 5 published ebooks.

Article Source: Article-Library.Net

Essentials of SEO

Essentials of SEO by sanjeev pandey

Search Engine Optimization can be defined as the amalgamation of a number of activities, and forms the subset of Search Engine Marketing(SEM). It is a technique through which you can effectively enhance a website’s organic search engine ranking and pave in for further increments in number of online visitors to your site. This is achieved by incorporating various changes on and off the website. But its imperative that you have a properly planned SEO campaign along with you.

It is essential that you should plan your web site’s SEO before creating the site. Right from the start, focus on creating search engine-friendly websites. One has to ensure that all the pages in the website should also have text, links and other popularity components.

Text components are comprises the major part of your pages. Most of the search engines usually build lists of words and phrases on URLs, and follows accordingly. So to make your web pages searchable, you must place these words on your webpages in the strategic HTML tags.

Link components forms another vital aspect in making your web site, more search engine friendly. A good combination of links and the way your web site is linked to other websites, has a lot of weightage in deciding your search engine positions. But one should be careful about the problematic areas such as like; poor html coding on all navigation schemes, too much usage of flash and etc.

The third aspect to boost your search engine rankings are effective incorporations of Popularity components, which consists of other sub components, namely, Link popularity, Click through popularity and Web page popularity.

These were the some of the key points which can have tremendous impact on you SEO campaigns. But, there are other activities as well, which comes under the above mentioned aspects. They can be enlisted as :

1.Targeted Keyword Research : this forms the backbone of any SEO campaign. One can effectively use google suggest, overture keyword suggestion, wordtrackers and many others to research on keyword building.

2.Competitor analysis: this includes analysis of competitor’s target keywords, role business model and optimization strategies, which can be beneficial in redesigning our campaign.

3.On page Optimization: website pages are tweaked and optimized for better search engine rankings. It includes, meta tags revision, use of heading tags(h1/h2), image optimization, file renaming and optimizing the over all website architecture.

4.Off Page Optimization: Inbound links from thematically similar websites can make your website more favorable for search engines and corresponding higher rankings.

5.Technical Optimization: these are the technical factors that can help you boost your search engine rankings. Some of them are such as canonical indexing, custom error pages and etc.

These are some of the essentials one has to complete it earnestly so as to fetch a better rank in Search engines. The whole process of increasing the rank of the website in popular search engines can take time, but pays off good, eventually.
Hence SEO is a necessity for your Internet marketing but more than that, it’s rewarding!

Sanjeev Pandey is associated with kneoteric. Kneoteric as an seo company india offering organic seo services, pay per click (ppc) management India, internet marketing, seo consulting, link popularity.

Article Source: Article-Library.Net