Rules to Better Google Rankings
1. Do you know how Google ranks pages?
2. Do you know your Page Rank?
3. Do you know if Google has indexed your page?
4. How many inbound links do you have?
5. Do you use enough keywords on the page?
6. Do you monitor the progress of your keywords?
7. Are your <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags descriptive?
8. Do you use META keywords and description tags?
9. Do you control your website's Page Rank distribution?
10. Is your URL consistently in the same case?
11. Do your links have relevancy to the page you're linking to?
12. Do your inbound picture links use attributes?
13. Do you ask similar sites for reciprocal links?
14. Do you avoid the temptation of link farms?
15. Does your website contain useful information?
16. Are you listed with DMOZ.org?
17. Do you avoid using frames on your website?
18. Does your Flash website have an alternate HTML site?
19. Do you use include files for your JavaScript?
20. Do you submit all your software to download sites?
21. Are your webpages less than 101k?
22. Do you make it easier for Google to find your dynamic pages?
23. Do you use your Robots.txt file effectively?
1. Do you know how Google ranks pages?
What makes Google so successful? The answer to that is Google's top
secret Page Rank Algorithm. We don't know much about how the Page Rank
Algorithm works today but what we do know is how it looked when it
was first conceived as a university paper called The Anatomy of a
Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine Leave Site.
The basic premise of the Page Rank 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. What many forgot was that the Page Rank Algorithm only comes into play as the last discriminating factor when calculating search results. In other words here's the things Google looks for before it calculates Page Rank:
1. 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
So looking for people to link to your site will only become important if you've got the first three discriminating factors nailed.
2. Do you know your Page Rank?
At SSW we use SSW Reminder Manager to monitor our performance on Google. SSW Reminder Manager emails our webmaster our Google search engine results pages when they change.
The first step to increase your Google ranking is to know what you're current Page Rank is. The only way to find that out is to download the Google toolbar. Every page is given a Page Rank between 0 and 10 You can see your Page Rank by holding your mouse over the Page Rank bar. This can be seen below.
[Google Toolbar]
Figure: The Sydney .NET User Group
The Page Rank on the Google Toolbar is only a representation of your actual Page Rank which is subject to change. We have long suspected that the Google Toolbar logs website attendance, then sends this information to Google and incorporates this into the Page Rank algorithm, but as with most things Google, this has never been confirmed.
What is the Google Dance?
Question: "My Page Rank was five yesterday, now it's three!"
You need to bear in mind that when it comes to the Google Toolbar the Page Rank that is shown is not always as it seems. There's a phenomena coined as the "Google Dance" which is when Google is updating its content amongst its hundreds of servers across many different countries (known as the "Google Farm"). This can take several days and your Page Rank is said to "dance" up and down so if you ever see your Page Rank take a dive don't sweat it. It might be Google doing the Cha Cha around your site. For example if you're page suddenly shows a Page Rank of zero, before you have a seizure a good way to check if your page hasn't been danced out of the index, is to do a Google search using the URL. If you still receive a result then it's highly likely that Google is still dancing.
3. Do you know if Google has indexed your page?
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?
Hot Tip!
Google Toolbar Cache
Figure: You can use the Google Toolbar to check your webpage's Google cache
You wouldn't believe this but when the Googlebots index web pages, it takes a snap shot of what the page looks like in the cache. We think that the most important page to get cached first is the site map.
Whether or not you think site maps are useful, once you have the site map indexed, those links that are on the site map count, and where do you think those links are pointing to? Web pages on your own website. So what you're actually doing is distributing your current and future PageRank and creating a bread crumb trail for the Googlebots to index the rest of your site.
So checking the Google cache thus becomes a very important for some of the key web pages like the site map.
At SSW we use SSW Reminder Manager to check our Google cache. SSW Reminder Manager emails our webmaster the Google cache whenever our important web pages are cached by Google.
Google Using Reminder Manager
Figure: SSW Reminder Manager emails of the Google cache Sfor the SSW Site Map
4. How many inbound links do you have?
All things said, in order for a page to get indexed it needs an inbound link. So websites also need inbound links to start building a decent Page Rank.
Beginners Tip
For newly created websites, we think that to have the Googlebot's take notice of your new website and achieve a Page Rank you'll probably need to have at least 3 inbound links on your website and a good internal linking structure.
Failure to do this will result in a zero Page Rank. You'll know that you've been dealt a zero Page Rank when the Page Rank on the Google toolbar is white. If it's grey, don't panic, it's likely that your pages weren't yet indexed by the Googlebot's. The Googlebots begin their reindexing of the internet every 3-4 weeks. If your Page Rank continues to be grey, you've probably designed your website in such a way that it remains invisible to Google like using frames or flash.
So a question that should arise at this point is:
Who's linking to (voting for) my site?
A good question and one that can be easily answered. To find out how many inbound links you have and where they're coming from you can tell by going to www.Google.com and in the search textbox type in "link:" then the URL of your page. Click on this link and see who is linking to SSW You are going to a site outside of SSW.
Figure: Using Google to find out how many people are linking to you
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.
A great way to automate your tracking of how many inbound links your web pages are getting is by using SSW Reminder Manager. You can set SSW Reminder Manager to send you emails containing information on how many inbound links your web pages have.
5.Do you use enough keywords on the page?
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 paragraph's 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 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:
* 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)
This page is testimony to the fact that keywords and content is 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 You are going to a site outside of SSW, or this one You are going to a site outside of SSW and even this one You are going to a site outside of SSW. 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.
Google Friendliness
Figure: Notice the abundance of keywords in the first few paragraphs
Search Engine World have some really nifty tools for webmasters that you can use to analyse your webpage in the eyes of a search engine, do keyword density analysis and many more. See Search Engine World Tools You are going to a site outside of SSW for some tools that will make you rethink the way you design your webpages.
6.Do you monitor the progress of your keywords?
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 SSW Reminder Manager to check our Google Rankings. SSW Reminder Manager emails our webmaster on a monthly basis the search engine results pages for our given keywords, 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.
7.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.
Bad Meta Keywords
Figure 1: Bad Example
Good Meta Key words
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>About Us</title>
<meta content="http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/ie5" name="vs_targetSchema">
<link href="http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Include/ssw.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
<link href= "http://www.ssw.com.au/SSW/Images/icoSsw.ico" rel= "shortcut icon" >
</head>
<h1> About Us </h1>
8.Do you use META keywords and description tags?
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:
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.
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.
9.Do you control your website's Page Rank distribution?
Question: Since every single page on the internet has the ability to receive a Page Rank, wouldn't that mean that all the pages that make up my website can pass on Page Rank to each other?
Answer: YES! In Google's eyes websites are made up of islands of webpages each voting for each other. It doesn't differentiate between votes that come from external websites or from within. The democratic ideal that Google has bestowed upon us is that all pages are considered equal. Martin Luther King best describes this democratic ideal:
"I have a dream, that my four little webpages will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the destination of their URL but by the content of their character."
Though you can't directly control the Page Rank that your website is going to receive, you can control the internal linking structure of your website which in turn effects the Page Rank distribution for all your individual pages. We know that when we link to two or more sites we're splitting the flow-on benefits of Page Rank. So in theory if we were to link to only one other webpage, that web page would be the sole beneficiary of the benefits. What this means is that if you have a large website and would like a majority of the Page Rank to be distributed towards, say your home page, you should have at least have one link on every page pointing to your home page and try to minimise outgoing links to other pages. Below is a simplistic view of how the distribution of Page Rank is split between the sites that you link to (internally or externally).
[Channelling PageRank to a particular page]
Figure: The main page gets a 4.5 page rank from the 3 internal pages linking to it with 1.5 page rank.
In our effort to distribute page rank to our home page we have a link at the bottom of every page in the form of an image with and alt tag which links back to our home page. See the SSW URL logo at the bottom of each page.
What you may have also realised is that as you increase the size of your website (in terms of pages) you're also increasing the the total Page Rank that can be distributed. So if you've got a large website filled with hundreds, thousands or millions of pages of content, you should be able to distribute the Page Rank flow amongst pages you feel is important via your internal linking structure. If you've got a small website and want to see the effects on Page Rank of outbound and inbound links follow this link to a Page Rank calculator You are going to a site outside of SSW.
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.
10. Is your URL consistently the same case?
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.au/ssw/" as different to "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.
Here's an example to illustrate this point. Here's all the pages linking to "www.ssw.com.au/ssw/" You are going to a site outside of SSW and then all the pages linking to "www.ssw.com.au/SSW/" You are going to a site outside of 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.
11. Do your links have relevancy to the page you're linking to?
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
1. Links that you receive should always have an appropriate description to the page it is linking to.
2. We don't like inbound links that use "More" and "Click Here" to link to us.
3. 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.
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.
12. 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.
SSW Logo NoText NoShadow
Figure: BAD EXAMPLE (scroll over)
[Search engines will index this text]
Figure: GOOD EXAMPLE (scroll over)
We have a program called SSW Code Auditor to check for this rule.
13. Do you ask similar sites for reciprocal links?
When you link to sites that are similar to yours both in content and quality there's a much higher likelihood that those sites are going to return the favour and link back to you. This is one of the best ways to reduce the amount of Page Rank that is leaked out of your website and proactively seek to increase Google rank.
When webmasters around the world caught on about the importance of inbound links some believed that it was only important to get links from websites that had an equivalent or higher Page Rank to theirs. This assumption is false. Your Page Rank will never decrease with a link from a lesser ranked page. The fact that the benefits of Page Rank is split between the sites that it links to, dampens the benefit that you might receive. For example a site with a 10 Page Rank links to your site and a 1000 others may not be as good as a site with a 5 Page Rank only linking to you.
So we say that the best thing to do is to get links from websites that are similar to yours and of relatively high quality. So even if the linking site has a low Page Rank now, because it's filled with quality information people will sooner or later link to it thus increasing the Page Rank benefits eventually flowing to you.
14. Do you avoid the temptation of link farms?
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. 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.
15. Does your website contain useful information?
Though there are many different ways to cheat the major search engines like Google and Yahoo, webmasters who try to cheat Google are gambling that the Googles and Yahoos are always one step behind. 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.
16. Are you listed with DMOZ.org?
The DMOZ Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. It's primary objective is to organize a small portion of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.A
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 LeaveSite.
17. Do you avoid using frames on your website?
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 Leave Site that you may use.
18. Does your flash website have an alternate HTML site?
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.
19. Do you use include files for your JavaScript?
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.
20. Do you submit all your software to download sites?
Do you use PADFiles to submit your software?
Most software download sites have caught on that software vendors don't want to have to cut and paste the same software specifications every time you submit your software to a new download site. So they've created a universally accepted method for submitting software that only requires you to maintain a XML File with your software specifications.
Most of the sites that do accept PADFiles will query your PADFiles every couple of weeks to check for updates, so its a good idea to keep them up to date. At SSW we love using PADFiles because it saves time, reduces errors and the need to replicate data. Here's a listing of our PADFiles for our products.
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.
21. Are your webpages less than 101k?
As a general rule of thumb we think that its a good idea to keep your websites down to 101k in size. Whilst we do know that the Googlebots often do crawl a bit deeper than that (exactly how much deeper we don't know), 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.
22. Do you make it easier for Google to find your dynamic pages?
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.
KB Index
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.
23. Do you use your Robots.txt file effectively?
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 Leave Site 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!
