Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and
webmasters alike.
Surfers like it because of the
highly relevant results it gives and the speed at which it delivers
them. 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 its site about the results it
produces. Hence 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 and
list your site. If you're not listed in Google and submit your URL
you're usually indexed within two weeks. If however your site is
already listed in the index Google should reindex once every month,
but more frequently if you've a high Pagerank™.
This indexing and 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 they made 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'll be ranked lower than all other
sites that are only slightly familiar with the Google algorithm
and hence could lose lots of potential customers.
Google ranking
algorithm
Let's now continue onto the
main part of this Google rankings report by indulging 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 search box. 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 pages relevant by discussing the text matching part of the
algorithm.
Google gives a lot of "weight"
to the title tag when searching for keywords. It is therefore vital to
make sure your most important keywords or keyphrases appear within this
tag. It seems to work best if you've other words in your title tag too
after your keywords, but try to remain under 35-40 characters.
I imagine many of you know
this already but Google does not use meta tags such as the keywords meta
tag or the description meta tag. This is because the text within these
tags can't be seen by visitors to a website. Therefore Google feels
these tags will be abused by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words
in them in order to get more visitors.
This lack of support for meta
tags means that Google creates your description from the first few lines
of text on your page. This in turn means that you've to have your
keywords and phrases right at the top of your webpage, if Google finds
them your page becomes more relevant, if however it doesn't find them
the rest of your page has to work harder to become relevant. To see an
example of what I mean scroll back to the top of this page and you'll
notice keyword rich wording similar to:
Google
submitting tips, ranking high at google.com, Google ranking tips,
pagerank algorithm, Google algorithm guide.
The above text includes keywords and keyphrases related to the theme of this page. Now
when people search for any of those keywords or keyphrases this page is
much more likely to be near the top of the results than a page that
doesn't imply this technique.
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.
Google has recently been
noticed to give a substantial amount of "weight" to words appearing
between the various header tags. These are tags designed to help you
split up sections of your page, so this approach by Google seems to
make sense. The header tags go from <h6> the smallest to <h1> the
biggest, the bigger the heading tag the more relevent your page will
become for the words within it. It is for this reason that you should
always try to have your most important words within these tags as
often as possible throughout your page.
Other advice about making
your page relevant would be to make as many keywords appear within
bold <b> tags as you can. In the past Google has been known to index
text in alt image tags, whether they still do or not I don't know but
it couldn't hurt to include keywords in these tags anyway.
About The Author
Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and
webmaster of . Visit his
webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines,
website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics. |
Google
ranking tips
