Getting a high placement in Google search results is not as simple as adding your url to the Google database. Placement of individual pages is determined by a number of factors outlined below.
Google Page Rank
The page rank system was developed by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University and was for many years a closely gaurded secret to prevent people from manipulating Google search results. Thankfully, Google are now more forthcoming about their search theory.
Each page indexed by Google is assigned a page rank, generally referred to its PR,
and ranges between 0 and 10.
The greater the pages rank, the higher it will appear in a Google search. The PR number is the value that google has assigned to your page i.e a page with a PR of 6 is more valued or important than a page with a PR of 0.
A page with a PR of 0 has either not been assigned a PR yet or has been peanalized by Google.
So how to you increase the Page Rank?
The page rank is assigned by checking how many and the quality of the sites that link to your page/site. In other words, to get a page rank you must have other sites linking to your site, but beware, links from low PR or penalized sites can harm your PR.
As a general rule, you should try to obtain links from sites with a PR of 5 and above and do not link to any sites below PR5. This is of course, easier said than done.
It is also preferable that the pages you link to are not “link farms” with lots of outgoing links. In this case a Pr6 from the original page is divided amongst all of the outgoing links, essentially reducing the PR to between 0 and 1.
It is also wise to restrict the number of outgoing links from your website and to
ensure that your site links to highly ranked sites with good content.
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Page Rank Summary |
| 1 |
Link to High PR sites with good content. |
| 2 |
Try not to link to link farms. |
| 3 |
Check the Pr and outgoing links of any sites your linking to. |
| 4 |
Link only to sites with a page rank of 5 and above with few outgoing links. |
How do you get links ?
Building appropriate links requires a lot of time and effort and should not be considered an instant process. You can find many link exchange sites, both free and subscription, on the web. These link exchange sites, require you to place a link on your site linking to another site which in turn will link to you. It is generally advisable to create a seperate links page to contain these outgoing links.
You can instruct Google not to index these pages by including a “no follow” clause in a meta tag on the search page as follows:
Or exclude a specific link as follows:
Should you decide to get involved in a link exchange program, be sure to check the content, page rank and outgoing links of any site you choose to link to.
Your Title Tag
Google checks the title of every page it indexes. Therefore you should ensure that all pages in your site have the title in the head section of your page as folows:
Keyword Density
Google considers Keyword density a large factor in ranking pages in
search engine results. Therefore, it is essential that much care is taken
to create good informative content.
Some search engines pay no attention to keywords and those that do, calculate the density in their own way.
Keyword density is one of the simplest ways to improve your sites placement in search engine results.
A keyword is a word that a user will use to search for relevant websites. The keyword density is the ratio between how many times this word or term
appears on your page against the total number of words on that page.
| To Improve Keyword Density |
| 1 |
Decide what keyword(s) is going to be used to search for your website.
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| 2 |
Ensure that this keyword is included wherever possible in your sites contents. This should include the main text, the alt tags etc.
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| 3 |
Repeat your keywords within your text as much as possible, while this is not considered good grammar, good grammar does not influence search engine listings.
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| 4 |
You should not try to influence search engine listings by senselessly repeating your keywords in your web page.
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Keyword Links
Ensure the links to your site contain appropriate keywords. If a site linking to yours has a link that says “web design specialist” then it will rank higher on a google search than a simple “click here” to visit web design specialist.
ALT Tags on Images
It is essential that all images on your website include an ALT tag. The details within this tag is indexed by the Google robot and therefore will affect your sites
ranking.
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