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SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)ARTICLES
"Google Ranking Tips with Pagerank ™"
Google Ranking tips
By David Callan - http://www.akamarketing.com
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 Pagerank™ system that this engine
uses. More on the Pagerank™ 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 Pagerank™.
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 Pagerank™ 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 to the top
of the page where this article was originally published
on http://www.akamarketing.com and you will see:
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 <h?> heading tags
</h?>. 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 Pagerank™ system.
Pagerank™ 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 Pagerank™ 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, Dick 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 Pagerank™ 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.
Pagerank™ 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 Pagerank™. 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 Pagerank™?
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, Pagerank™ 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 www.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.
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.
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