Article: Google Ranking tips

Quote: From:Complete Results Marketing Newsletter
The Weekly Internet Promotion Ezine
ISSN:1527-9758 September 19, 2002 http://www.completeresults.com/archives/googlerankingtips.html

Google is by far the most popular search engine available today
for both ordinary surfers and webmasters.

Surfers like it because of the highly relevant results it gives,
and the speed it gives them at. This is due to its complex text
matching algorithm and of course the PagerankT system that this
engine uses. More on the PagerankT system later.

Google is popular with webmasters and Internet Marketing
companies due to the highly workable ranking system it uses.

Unlike other engines where information about how the results are
obtained are sketchy at best, Google actually publishes
information on it's site about the results it produces. So
webmasters have things they can do to produce higher rankings.
What also makes Google popular with webmasters is the speed at
which they will spider / list your site.

If you are not listed in Google and submit you are usually
indexed within two weeks. If however your site is already listed
in the index Google should reindex once everymonth, but more
frequently if you have a high PagerankT.

This indexing / reindexing time is much quicker than most other
search engines, this allows webmasters to edit their pages
properties such as title, first few lines of text, headings,
keyword distribution and of course the number of incoming links
to their site. They can then discover quickly if the changes were
successful or not.

It's because of this popularity that you need to know the
workings of the google search engine, without knowledge of it you
will be ranked lower than all other sites that are only slightly
familiar with the Google algorithm.

So lets indulge ourselves in the Google ranking algorithm. Well
there are two main parts to the algorithm google uses, the first
is its text matching system, whereby Google tries to find pages
relevant to what the searcher has entered in. The second and
equally important part of the algorithm is of course the Google
patented PagerankT system.

I'll first go through how to make your page relevant, i.e. - the
text matching part of the algo.

Google gives a lot of "weight" to the title tag when searching
for keywords. So make sure your most important keywords or
keyphrases appear in the title tag. It's seems to work best if
you have other words in your title tag too after your keywords,
but try to remain under 35-40 characters.

As many of you know Google does not use meta tags such as
keywords or description tags this is because the text in these
tags cannot be seen by visitors to a website. And Google feels
these tags will be abused, by webmasters placing lots of
unrelated words in them in order the get more visitors.

The lack of support for meta tags means that Google creates your
description from the first few lines of text on your page, this
means you have to have your keywords and phrases right at the
top, if it finds them your page becomes more relevant. If it
doesn't the rest of your page has to work harder to become
relevant. For example Scroll back to the top of this page and you
will see:

AKA Marketing .com - Free Internet Marketing Articles , Google
submitting tips, ranking high at google.com

The above sentence includes keyphrases related to this page.

Google considers keyword density in the body of a page for
determining relevancy too, so make sure your keywords and phrases
appear a couple of times throughout the whole page. Don't go
overboard though, a density of 6-10% seems to work best.

Other advice about making your page relevant includes putting
keywords into the heading tags . Also try and bold as
many keywords as you can. As of late Google seems to be indexing
text in alt image tags, so includes your keyphrases in there too.

One final tip on page relevancy is the point on having your
keywords and phrases in links which point to your site. It is a
good idea to have the linking text contain your keywords as
Google even says itself that it analyzes pages that links come
from too, in it's description of it's pagerank technology.

How much keyword laden links matter is anyone's guess. But I have
noticed a lot of sites which give the HTML code to visitors who
want to exchange links do include keywords in the actual linking
area. You should do something like this to on your links page.
Say something like "if you want to link to this site, please use
the following code".

In the above section of the article you have learned what areas
Google uses and looks at when looking for a relevant site. But
what method does Google use to determine which site is better,
the answer is the PagerankT system.

PagerankT is as the name suggests a ranking system of pages. It
works on the basis that if a website ABC.COM has been linked from
a website XYZ.COM, abc.com must have some good content and
therefore Google will count the link from XYZ.COM as a vote for
ABC.COM

The PagerankT scale goes from 1 to 10 on the Google toolbar and
from 1 to 7 beside listings on the Google toolbar. A less
important site is of course a site with a PR of 1 and a very very
important site is a site with a PR of 7 or 10, in the directory
or toolbar respectively.

The more links or votes a site has the more important it must be
and therefore 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, if that was the case every webmaster from Iceland to Vietnam
would try and exchange links to every tom, **** and harry website
that would let them. In Googles own words

"Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a
page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote.
Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more
heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Hopefully your beginning to get the idea. If not - The idea is to
have your page linked to by as many high quality and high
pageranked sites as possible. Right?, RIGHT and WRONG.

WRONG BECAUSE - You see Google pagerank system also takes into
account the number of links the page that has linked to you has.
The reasoning for this is that a page X has a certain amount of
voting PR, if your site Y is the only link from that page X, then
Google feels confident that page X thinks your page Y is the best
link it has, and will give you more PR. If however page X has 50
links, page X could think your only the 50th best page. So the
more links it has the less of a PR boost your site gets.

RIGHT BECAUSE - Linking to a site with a 6+ PR will provide a
significant boost to your PR in most cases, but in cases where
the site also links with 100 other sites the boost will be almost
zero. Likewise if a site has a PR of just 2 but you and only one
other site are linked from it, then the PR boost would be more
than the site with 100 links and a PR of 6.

It's beginning to come complex isn't it, just wait till you see
this formula. Its looks scary for non math's people.

First let me explain what the damping factor is. The damping
factor is the amount of your PR which you can actually pass on
when you vote / link to another site. The damping factor is
widely known to be .85 . This is a little less 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 PagerankT boost your page will get
after being linked from someone else's site (t1). PR(t1) is the
pagerank of the page which links to you and C(t1) is the amount
of total links that (t1) has. It is important to know that a
pages voting power is only .85 of that pages actual PR and this
voting power gets spread out evenly between all sites it links
to.

Imagine akamarketing.com was linked by XYZ.COM's link page which
had 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 a page with a PR of four and 9 other links.

Lets say I was linked from a site with a PR of 8 - double the
previous example's amount, which had 15 other links, a total of
16 outbound links, my boost 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
linking page important but what is also important is how many
other sites are also linked / voted for from that page.

OK, I think we've had enough mathy stuff for now. Just remember
that the name of the 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 your rankings will improve
for your relevant keywords.

The best thing you can do for your PR seems at the moment seems
to be getting listed in Dmoz.org - The Open Directory Project.

PagerankT is widely known to be biased towards big name
directories such as Dmoz.org, Yahoo and Looksmart.

This is true, especially in the case of Dmoz.org. These ODP links
are treated like gold by PagerankT. It doesn't even matter what
the individual PR of the category page is. I have seen sites gain
a large PR boost on the toolbar as soon as Google updates it's
directory with the latest one from dmoz.org. This is because
Google uses it's own version of ODP for the Google web directory.

Don't believe ODP links are very important to PagerankT?
Don't believe a listing in the ODP will boost your ranking?

Well they are and they will. Perform a search for almost anything
on Google and you'll discover that 75-80% of the top 10 results
are also indexed in the Google directory. The fact of the matter
seems to me to be if your not listed in ODP, you shouldn't expect
much traffic from Google.

It's not difficult, it does sometimes take time, but it's not
difficult. Just make sure you site has good content and follow
the guidelines for adding a URL. Try to get you index page listed
at least. I say at least because although ODP claims only to list
your index page, there are plenty of sites with 5 - 10 pages
listed. So if your site has very distinctive sections, then
submit each section - slowly. Once Google updates it's directory,
these listings could do wonders for your site maximum PR.

As for Yahoo and Looksmart, PagerankT will usually allocate a
more than normal amount of PR boost for any sites listed. For
tips on getting listed in Yahoo, read Yahoo Submitting Tips.

If you are a non-commercial site or have a site that's almost
completely non-commercial you can get into the looksmart
directory through Zeal.com. I really love this site, just
like Google obtains results from ODP, Looksmart obtains it's
non-commercial listings from the Zeal web directory, without Zeal
I would have to fork out hard earned cash and all my site does is
provide information.

To continue - I submitted AKA Marketing.com on a Tuesday and was
listed in Zeal by Thursday morning. On Monday I checked my logs
and found lots of referrals from Looksmart, I was in Looksmart
already. I looked at my logs later only to find MSN had updated
it's DB from the looksmart DB and was sending my loads of
visitors cause of the good listing I got. My site was listed in
Zeal, Looksmart and MSN within six days. So get over to Zeal.com
and submit your site.

Before you can submit a site however you must pass a member quiz,
which is fairly simple and straightforward.

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 and rankings.

RECAP
Have your main keywords and phrases in your TITLE tag and well
spread throughout your page. Get as many links from as many high
PR low number of outbound links pages you can. GET LISTED IN
DMOZ.ORG, Yahoo and Looksmart.

Well that's it. I hope you have enjoyed this Google Ranking tips
article, as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I also hope that
you can put this advice into use and help get yourself some real
traffic.

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Article by David Callan - mailto:admin@akamarketing.com
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com.
Visit his site for articles and tutorials focusing on
internet marketing and website promotion. AKA Marketing.com
Also includes free ebooks, webdesign and HTML tutorials.