如何提高google网站排名
Google is by a country mile the most popular search engine in the world. It's popular because it seems to rank pages so accurately and
quickly time and time again. The secret to its success is its top secret
Page Rank Algorithm. Google developed its page ranking system in an effort to
increase the quality of search results and has left all of its competitors for dead. As a result search engine
optimization (SEO) gurus are always
looking to find new ways to increase their Google rankings. As we all
know, a website is a pretty nifty thing to have for a myriad of
different reasons. But the truth is that it's worth is derived from the people that
surf it, and if no one is surfing it, then it becomes useless. So who's the biggest website
referrer? The answer is Google in almost every case.
The Google Page Rank is based on how many links you have to and from your pages,
and their respective page rank.
The problem for many SEO guru's has been a lack of understanding
regarding where page rank comes from, and how internal and external
links distribute page rank between pages. I have spoken to
many webmasters who don't know that there is more to increasing page
rank than
simply getting reciprocal links.
There is a plethora of information out there and we've brought it
all together to show you some common strategies to influence your Google rankings and
improve your website's "Google
Friendliness".
Do you agree with them all? Are we missing some? Email me your tips, thoughts or arguments. Let me know what you think.
-
Do
you know how Google ranks pages? - Finds all pages matching the keywords of the search
- Rank accordingly using "on the page" factors
(proximity between words, frequency, repetition etc) - Calculate the relevancy of
inbound anchor text - Uses the page rank to decide what order to display the results in
-
Do you know if
Google has indexed your page? -
Do you know your
Page Rank? Do you create more page rank for yourself?
Creating more pages is the only way to create page rank from nothing, as every page
on your site starts it's life with the same base page rank as did every other page on the web.
It follows from this that having more pages is better, and having excessively long pages is a waste
- you would end up with more page rank
to distribute if you split it into two pages instead. Three other ways of
increasing page rank are using automatic directories like DMOZ,
by writing Blogs,
and by having other websites with good page rank link to you.
Do you conserve your page rank?
Do you concentrate your page rank where it will do the most good?
Given that
you have a certain amount of page rank to work with, the challenge becomes
to decide which pages on your site are the most important, and distribute
your page rank to these pages so that they turn up in search results. A
simple rule to follow here is to have lot's of links to and not many links
from your important pages.
Figure: The main page gets a 4.5 page rank from the 3 internal pages linking to it with 1.5 page rank.-
How many inbound
links do you have? -
Do you use enough keywords?
- Increase Google Friendliness
- Better/Increase Google Ranking
- Page Rank
- Search Engine Optimization (Note: In Australia we spell optimization
with an "s" [optimisation] but I'm willing to bet that most people searching
online would use the American way of spelling it. So I had to take this into
consideration) -
Do you monitor the progress of your keywords?
-
Are your <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags descriptive?
The <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags need to be descriptive. They should briefly describe the purpose or content
of the page. Have a look at the following two images. The first image is a bad example as the title bar and page heading are not very
descriptive. The second image is a better example as title bar and page heading are more informative.
Figure 1: Bad Example
Figure 2: Good Example
Technical Information
The following code segment shows the areas that should be changed.
The code in green is the text that should be changed to something more descriptive. It should give the reader
a good idea of the page content or the section it is describing.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC
"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<metacontent="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5"
name="vs_targetSchema">
<link href="http://www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Include/ssw.css"
type="text/css"
rel="stylesheet">
<link
href= "http://www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Images/icoSsw.ico"
rel= "shortcut icon"
>
</head>
<h1>
About Us</h1>
-
Do you use META keywords and description tags?
-
Is your URL consistently the same case?
-
Do your links have relevancy to the page you're linking to?
- Links that you receive should always have an
appropriate description to the page it is linking to. - We don't like inbound links that use "More" and "Click Here" to link to us.
- Inbound links should always be consistent in case as Google is case
sensitive and will display different results for upper and lower case URLs.
See the consistent case rule for details.
Do you make it easier for Google to find your dynamic pages?
-
Do your inbound picture
links use attributes?What do you do when you want images to link to your site? In the case of
images Google will look for the alt text and factor this into the search
results. So when you ask someone else to link to your site with an image you
should always add attributes like "alt" and "title" into the code. Here's an example.
Hold the cursor over the image below and see what happens.
Figure:
BAD EXAMPLE (scroll over)
Figure: GOOD EXAMPLE (scroll over)We have a program called SSW Code Auditor to check for this rule. -
Do you avoid the temptation of link farms?
-
Are you listed with DMOZ.org?
-
Do you avoid using frames on your website?
-
Does your flash website have an alternate HTML site?
-
Do you use include files for your
JavaScript? -
Do you submit all your software to download sites?
-
Are your webpages less than 101k?
-
Do you use your Robots.txt file effectively?
What makes Google so successful? The answer to that is Google's Page Rank Algorithm.
You can read about the early days of the page rank algorithm here:
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
.
The actual Page Rank algorithm looks like this: PR(U) = (1-d) + d * sumV(PR(V)/N(V)).
Here PR = Page Rank, U is the page we're looking at, d is a constant
damping factor and V is a page that links to our page.
The basic premise that comes from this algorithm is:
When I
link to your page, I'm casting a vote that your page is good and the more links
(votes) that
are received the better the page is.
This statement alone sent shockwaves through the webmaster community and
sent many webmasters on a endless quest for links. All pages begin with an
equal page rank, which is then moved around based on the internal and
external links to and from that page.
It's important not to
forget that Page Rank is not the only factor involved in a search.
Essentially Google completes the following steps when you perform a search:
So looking for people to link to your site will only become important if you've
got the first three discriminating factors nailed.
| Hot Tip!  Figure: You can use the Google Toolbar to check your webpage's Google cache |
First things first, you should check if your web page has been indexed by Google. Don't be surprised if Google is
already one step ahead
of you - its Googlebots could have already crawled your site without you knowing. So what's the best way to find
out if Google has indexed your web page? Use the Google toolbar.
When one of Google's spiders indexes your site, it takes a
snap shot of what each page looks like and stores it in its cache.
Please note that the default settings do NOT include this very useful button.
To turn it on, you have to press Options on the toolbar, go to the "More" tab, and check the "Page Info menu" option.
The first step to increase your Google ranking is to know what you're
current Page Rank is, that way you can keep track of whether your changes
are working.
The only way to find out the page rank of a page is to download the Google
toolbar. Page Rank is actually a measure of how likely it is that your page
will be found relative to all others during a random search. Google
calculates this as an integer between 1 and 2 million. This scale is then
mapped to give the page rank of between 1 and 10. This means that it's not
entirely accurate. Imagine that your website has a 'real' page rank of
1,000,001, and one of your competitors' page has a page rank of 1,000,000.
All other things being equal, he will beat you, although both page ranks
will show up as the same when scored out of 10.
Figure: The Sydney .NET User Group
Links cannot create page rank for you, but they can certainly move it
around, including moving it to pages on other peoples websites. Be aware: the Google algorithm looks at pages not domains, so there is
nothing to stop your valuable page rank being distributed around the web.
The reciprocal is true also, you 'bleed' page rank from the pages that link
to you. If these links are coming from another domain then that's probably
good, but if the extra page rank is coming at the expense of other pages on
your site, it may be bad. So you see that page rank bleed makes it vital how you handle
your external links, as each one can lower the page rank of your page. There
is a way to link to pages without bleeding rank. You do this by putting the
'nofollow' attribute in your link. This looks like this:
<a href=home.html rel=nofollow>Some Text</a>. It is probably
a good idea to make all your external links nofollow, thus conserving your
page rank within your site.
Now that you have page rank sorted, it's time to concentrate on the other
important things to worry about. Who's linking to me is an important
question, and one that can be easily answered. To find out how many inbound links you have and where they're
coming from, go to www.Google.com and type in "link:" then the
URL of your page. Click on this link and
see who is linking to SSW
.
Figure: Using Google to find out how many people are linking to you
A limitation to the "link" functionality on Google is that it doesn't list all of the links that Google
knows about, it only lists those that contribute over a certain level of
Page Rank. In other words if you're getting a link from a webpage with
thousands of links on it you're probably not gaining much Page Rank from them
if any at all. And there's a good chance that it won't be shown using the
link to functionality on Google. See our
distribution rule for details on how Page Rank is split and distributed
amongst webpages.
Odds are you'll notice that a majority of links that are coming to that page
are from your own website.
This highlights the notion that Page Rank is calculated on a page by page
basis. Websites don't accumulate Page Rank, webpages do.
If you're sick to death of begging people for reciprocal links a quick and easy fix is to make sure you have enough of the right
keywords on your page. As a general rule of thumb we try to get all the great keywords in the first
few paragraphs of every page so that
spiders can't miss it.
Lets use this page as an example. Before I wrote this page I sat down
and thought about some keywords people would use if looking for some Google tips
and tricks on how to increase your rankings. The words I used for the URL
were chosen with search engine optimization in mind and here are a few more
of my keywords I hoped to rank well with:
This page is testimony to the fact that keywords and
content are the key to better Google rankings. You can find all of the above mentioned words several times in the first couple of paragraphs
and this is why my page ranks really well. See for yourself
try this search
, or
this one
and even
this one
.
Notice the extraordinary rankings for the keywords. You can even try the
same thing in Yahoo and we still ranking very well. As you can see we're on the first page simply because strategic choice and
placement of keywords.
Figure: Notice the abundance of keywords in the first few paragraphs
Every month when the Googlebots start reindexing your website looking for new
content and keywords, it's a good idea to keep track of how your Google rankings
are going.
| At SSW we use Web CEO to check our Google Rankings. Web CEO checks the search engine results for our keywords on a schedule, allowing us to continually monitor our Google rankings. |
We've listed some of our product related keywords that we care about on our
Google Keywords page. By
clicking on any of the links on our keywords column it shows you what the search
engine results pages are for those keywords.
One of the easiest ways to get the ball rolling with your web pages and being noticed by search engines is to use META tags. Search
engines use META tags to categorise your website's content. Many webmasters took this as a opportunity to abuse the META tags and the
earlier less sophisticated search engines found that the quality of search results were suffering. Luckily today's search engines like
Google don't give the META tags so much weight when determining search engine results pages. In any case we know that search engines do consider them
so we think it would be silly to overlook such a quick and easy task to complete.
There are two kinds of META tags you should use:
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.
Trying starting with 3 to 5 'key' words from your Title.
Where possible combine the words into logical phrases and we recommend using all lower case letters (and NO LEADING SPACES) when specifying keywords!
| We have a program called led SSW Code Auditor to check for this rule. |
NOTE: what you really want is a report that lists every single page on your
website and their relative page rank so that you can ensure that no unimportant
pages are receiving a high page rank.
The URL text behind your domain URL (i.e. after the .com or .com.au) should be
spelt using a consistent case (upper or lower). We know that Google is case
sensitive when it comes to URLs and treats webpages with the URL "www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/" as different to "www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/".
This has some pretty big implications on making sure people link to you in a
consistent manner.
| At SSW we use SSW Code Auditor to check that all of our URLs display consistently. |
example to illustrate this point. Here's all the pages linking to
"www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/"
and then all the pages linking to
"www.ssw.com.auhttp://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/"
. As we can see Google is thinking that these two pages are different, also
assigning both pages a different Page Rank when they are actually the same
page. Please note whilst Google is case sensitive when it comes to URLs it
isn't when it comes to the keywords you put into the search box. i.e. a
search for "UPSIZING PRO" and "upsizing pro" will still return the same
results.
We know that the way your inbound links are worded do make a difference, they play a crucial factor when Google searches are
made by search engine users. Google uses the words between your <a href>
tags to decide which websites are the most relevant to the search terms.
For example if we had a million inbound links that described SSW like this:
<a href="http://www.ssw.com.au">Movies for Free</a>
When someone searches for free movies on Google, Google would point to us.
So what does this mean? All those that are pointing to pages on your website
that are displayed as 'More' or 'Click Here' aren't doing you any favours when it comes to increasing your Google rankings.
| Quick Link Tips
|
Example 1: "For tips and tricks to increase your Google Rankings
Click Here"
is bad
Example 2: "For tips and tricks to increase your Google Rankings
Click Here"
is still bad but better then the one above (scroll and hold over link to see the
difference)
Example 3:
"For tips and tricks to increase your Google Rankings go to our
Rules to Better Google Rankings
is best
This rule also has relevance for
easier website
navigation.
| We have a program called SSW Code Auditor to check for this rule. |
We do know that Google is one of the few search engines that crawl dynamic/database driven websites.
The thing is that much like the other search engine crawlers, it doesn't like it very much, so it
selectively crawls little bits and pieces. We think that the best way to get your database driven
website crawled by Google is to
have an index of your dynamic pages so that the Googlebots have a singular point of reference to your dynamic pages.
It's a slow process, but it will be well worth it.
Take a look at how we tackle this issue. We have a knowledge base with hundreds of pages and we list them all here on our
kbindex page. We know that Google has crawled our kbindex page because it shows up on the
Google cache,
which means that all of our articles will be indexed. We've also applied this same principle with our
site map.
Figure: By default the dynamic pages behind this page would be invisible to google. You need to provide a link that will make them visible to google.
There are many search engine optimization techniques that are quick and easy fixes, like being in a link farm.
To join a link farm people pay to be part of a collection of webpages where
their sole purpose is to provide interconnecting links and harvest Page Rank
amongst members. Many of these "get ranked quick" methods have some serious
repercussions. 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 penalises crud.
Many of these link farms and websites that subscribe to them have been identified and banned by Google so you should never
be lured into the temptation of quick easy solution to search engine
optimization. Employing dodgey optimization techniques is a gamble, you're
gambling that the smart people over at Google aren't as smart as you.
| The DMOZ Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive |
Many webmasters have written articles proclaiming that being listed with DMOZ.org and Yahoo automatically gets you an
artificially high Page Rank. They
think this because DMOZ and Yahoo use Google technologies. This may not be entirely correct.
What we do know is that the data that DMOZ collects is used by hundreds of sites.
With many of these sites linking to you, the Page Rank benefits are probably too weak
to be listed in a link search, but we know that the Googlebots do crawl them, and the links do count.
So what you get is heaps of lightly weighted links coming from sites that
you may not be aware of adding to your Page Rank. All things considered, its free to list with DMOZ and you might
as well take the 10 minutes to fill out the form. Here's a link to
DMOZ
.
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.
However, there is a solution for those that have
already taken the plunge. You can use Meta Tags in your code, but considering
that some search engines don't rely on these, you also need to use the no frames tag in your code. Many
webmasters use those tags to leave messages for people that don't have frames
enabled, however this is the only part of the site the search engines will be
able to search. So we recommend a summary of your site and its purpose with a
link back to home on every page of your site. Here's a link to some
code
that you may use.
Whilst the use of Flash is becoming increasingly common as companies seek more visually enticing websites, the truth is that Flash remains
invisible to most
search engines. The solution to this is to have a HTML option available with the
same content as the Flash site. This also helps with users that don't have Flash
installed or don't want to wait for long periods of time for the page to
load up.
Many websites use JavaScript for fancy menus, drop downs or scroll overs. Many search engines don't recognise JavaScript
and even for those that do, if the web spiders are spending most of their time
sifting through JavaScript instead of content, you risk your content not being
indexed at all. At SSW we use include files in
all of our pages. This keeps the code clean
and helps search engines index pages.
As suggested a great way to increase your websites search engine rankings is to get inbound links towards your website. Being a software
vendor we do this by submitting our products to freeware/shareware download sites like Shareware River and Tucows.
So if you find a site that accepts software submissions make sure you submit your entire product range, not just one.
As a general rule of thumb we think that its a good idea to keep your websites down to 101k in size.
As well as the premise that more smaller pages will give you more page rank
that fewer longer pages, the Google cache never goes higher than 101k. The Google cache is a snapshot of what the webpage looked like
the last time the Googlebots crawled your site. Click on the link to take a look at this page's
Google cache.
The snapshot may not be the same as how it looks now simply because that's how
it looked the last time the Googlebots were in town.
If you decide to you use the
redirect
method when linking to external pages from your site, it's a good idea to
have a robots.txt
file in your root directory. In the robots.txt file you specify that the
robot (or spider as they're sometimes known) should not look in the redirects folder. This will
avoid the problem that can sometimes occur where put a Google search will
sometimes incorrectly display content from another site as if it was from
your site. Also, this avoids incorrect hits on your redirects, mucking up
your statistics which is one of the main reasons you would use redirects in
the first place!
