Climbing Google's Search Results (Technical)

How does Google decide how relevant your website is in searches? Understanding this greatly helps your web developer to increase traffic to your website. This is a technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Google ranks your website according to their own Page Rank Algorithm.

When you do a search, Google goes through the following steps:

1. It finds all pages matching the keywords of the search
2. Rank accordingly using "on the page" factors (proximity between words, frequency, repetition etc.)
3. Calculate the relevancy of inbound anchor text
4. Uses the page rank to decide what order to display the results in

How can I know if Google has indexed my site?
Don't be surprised if Google already indexed your site without you knowing. Their GoogleBots (also called spiders) constantly crawl the web and follow links, maybe being directed to your site. When your site is indexed, Google caches a snapshot of it.

 There are two ways you can check if your site is indexed:
1.   Type into a new Google search "site:www.xxx.yyy". For instance, to check if my site is indexed I will Google "site:www.ayobadesigns.co.za". If there are results returned, your site is indexed.
2. Install the Google Toolbar. After installation, go to its Options, click the "More" tab and check the "Page Info Menu" option. Now you can select the Page Rank button on the toolbar and choose "Cached snapshot of page" while you are vising your own web page. If a snapshot is displayed, your site has been indexed.

Know your Page Rank
You should know your calculated Page Rank in order to track progress of your Search Engine Optimization. To do this, use this Page Rank tool and follow the steps. The result returned will be x/10. Now you got a number to work with!

Increase your Page Rank
Every page on your site starts with a default base Page Rank (PR), just like every web page. You can create more pages on your site to increase it's PR. Having more pages on your site is better, having too long pages is a waste. Distribute your information over more pages, dividing it into a logical structure. Other ways to increase your PR is to regularly write blogs on your website and to have other websites with a good PR link to your site.

Check your inbound links
Inboud links are links from other sites to yours. These are vitally important in improving your SEO. To see who is linking to your site, search in Google for "link:" followed by your web address. For my site I'll search "link:www.ayobadesigns.co.za". Unfortunately, though, this only returns results with a significant PR, and not all pages indexed by Google. Even if pages link to your site but aren't listed here due to too low PR themselves, Google still uses them to rank your site positively.

Creating inbound links
Create inbound links on other web pages. Let those links drive GoogleBots and traffic (human visitors) to your website. 

When linking to your site, do not link like this. But rather link to the website's name or content keywords, like this web design. 
Technically  this means that anchor tags must be descriptive, else it is not helping your site's SEO.

Keywords

Content and relevant keywords are the single most important factor in SEO. Make sure your pages include all the keywords relevant to your page's content. A general rule of thumb is to get all the important keywords in the first few paragraphs of every page so that spiders can't miss it.

Before writing content for your site, you have to decide which keywords will be relevant to your content. Your site will be listed as a result when people search for these keywords in Google, and Yahoo & Bing for that matter.

Descriptive HTML tags
The <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags need to be descriptive. They should briefly describe the purpose of your content page. Have your web designer make sure this is implemented.

For instance, setting the <Title> to "Ayoba Designs: Bloemfontein Web Design" summarizes the web site. It says (1)The company name, (2) Where it is located and (3) What it does. <h1> and <h2> tags are used to put heading for content pages. <h1> being the first, bigger heading and <h2> being a sub-heading.

Instead of having the heading tags say "About Us", rather let it say "About Ayoba Designs - Web Designer in Bloemfontein".

Write Fresh & Catchy Content
If you have good content, people will always come back for more. Keep it fresh and up-to-date. Archive your content for people to refer back to later. This will also help your ranking in search engines like Google. It is website owner's responsibility to ensure new content is added regularly.

META Tag Keywords
Search engines use META tags to categorize your website's content. META tags are hidden keywords inserted to tell search engines what the content is about. This was more common place in earlier years and play little role in search engine rankings at the moment.

However, though the importance of META tags have decreased, it is still easy to add to your site and should therefore not be ignored.

There are two kinds of META tags you should use:

META-Description tag: 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.

Use no more that 5 keywords, and type them all lower-case. Adding META Tags is your web developer's responsibility, unless you have a Content Management System (CMS) where you add your own content to your site.

Typing your URL
Whenever you type or share your URL, ensure it is always typed in lower-case since Google's ranking algorithm is case-sensitive. For instance, www.AyobaDesigns.co.za and www.ayobadesigns.co.za is not seen as the same page. Be sure to type your URL like this wherever you share your link.

Index data-driven pages
When your site has a page which has its content built dynamically from a database, you have to show all the possible content that can be loaded to the GoogleBots as separate pages (as your visitors will see it too). You can do this by adding link which displays an index of all the content. 

Working with Inbound Pictures
When you want images to work as a link to your website, you have to add the image's ALT and TITLE tags. For instance:


Not good:


   
Good: (Hover over the image)

Avoid Link Farms
Link farms are websites whose sole purpose is to create interconnecting networks of links. 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". So after all is said and done a safe and sure fire way to increase your website's Page Rank is to provide useful information that other websites will want to link to. Google's ideal of the Internet is that it should be filled with webpages that have high quality information and based on this ideal it rewards high quality content and penalizes crud.


Avoid using Frames 
Websites 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 webpage, and with framed websites this is not the case. We recommend that you avoid frames altogether.


Domain Registration
Register your domain for the maximum time-period (usually 10 years). Google will notice this and assume your site is permanent and rank your site higher.

Use US English
The majority of web traffic comes from the US, so standardize your content to fit the US-standard English. Write new content in a word processor like Microsoft Word and set the language to US English. Always spell-check content before publishing.

Google Places
With the growing trend to localize searches, it is important to add your business to Google's Places. Add your Google Places entry.

For more information on improving traffic to your site, see Ways to Get Your Site Noticed

Original Article:
http://www.ssw.com.au/SSW/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterGoogleRankings.aspx#GoogleIndex 

This has also been posted on the Ayoba Designs Web Design Blog

Ayoba Designs: Web Design