August 14, 2008

How to Improve Your Google Listing and Achieve a Higher Search Engine Ranking

by Peter Nisbet

There are many ways in which you can improve your Google listing, and some work better than others depending on the type of website you have or on your niche. Here are ways in which you can get a higher Google ranking, or even a better search engine ranking in general.

We shall forget about onpage SEO such as use of meta tags and use of keywords since that has been done to death by now. There are other things that you can do to improve your search engine ranking, and among them are:

1. Put a site map on your website. You can generate an XML site map using any of several tools listed on Google, and a simple, search should enable you to find one. Once you have followed the instructions, you should submit the site map to Google and to Yahoo, and each will then be able to crawl your website without hindrance. It will also be updated each time the search engines crawl your site because XML sitemaps update as you add new pages to your site. Your site map should uploaded to the root directory of your website.

2. Start up a blog using one of the two main free blogging hosts, Blogger or Wordpress. In fact, why not use both and get the benefit of each? Blogger is owned by Google, so a Blogger blog is of particular benefit for Google listings. Put the URL of the pages of your website that you want promote on your blog, and these pages will be visited next time your blog is crawled.

3. Open an account with Technorati, and some of the other social bookmarking sites, and submit your blog to them. Ping them each time you make a new posting, and you will get good exposure to search engines whenever they visit these sites (which is very often).

4. Use social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to advertise your blog, or even your website. In fact put both your blog and your website on these sites, and you will get one-way back-links to your site, thus improving your Google PageRank and search engine results positions.

5. Make sure that all of your links are open. Nothing ruins your Google listing than broken links, and you must test all of your links to make sure that they are all working. You aren’t expected to do that manually, and there is software available online to test your links for you.

6. Avoid reciprocal links like the plague, unless you have arranged them privately and both of you are happy with their positioning. Links farms, and large list pages on which you are at #259 on the SEO page, are not only useless with respect to any PageRank votes, but can actually do you harm. So steer clear of them. There are enough ways of securing one-way links without having to negotiate reciprocal links. These days are long gone.

7. Register with Google Webmaster Tools, and check out their analysis of your website. The software can detect broken links, but more importantly, can carry out other tasks such as making sure that only one form of your URL is recognized, and checking out your Meta tags. Although these are not used as much as previously, they are used or Google wouldn’t be checking them for you!

8. Register for a free Squidoo lens, and use your URL on that. Not simply just as a URL, but as a means of solving a problem. A Squidoo lens is like a mini-website, and you can use it to present a problem, and then your website as a solution. Not only does that get you one-way back-links to your choice of website page, but also the potential of loads of traffic: people that want their problem solved.

So there are eight methods of promoting your website and improving your search engine ranking. There e other ways to improve your Google listing, but these are very effective off site methods of doing so, other than 1 and 5 that are essential on-site techniques - even more important than meta tags and the correct html tags.

Apply each one of these and you should be rewarded with an improved Google listing, and your search engine ranking in general should be enhanced.

About the Author

These are only eight methods of improving your Google listings, but SEOcious will provide you with many more methods of attaining a very high search engine ranking for your website.

July 23, 2008

Six Ways of Increasing Your Google Page Rank

by T. Allen

There are several ways you can increase Google page rank - several techniques can be used to get that highly coveted #1 spot in Google search. But first, what is page rank?The Google page rank tells you how important a website is. It tells you how many sites are linked to another website. Page rank is denoted by the number 0 to 10 and the higher the number, the more important the site is.

The algorithm used by Google to compute the site page rank is highly confidential but we already have an idea on the different factors that they count. Some say it is the website link popularity that matters most. Others say content is also a big factor. There are others still who say that it’s not simply the number of links that matters but also the relevancy of each link. For example, if your niche is “music production” and the links to your site comes from real estate site, you might not get a high page rank from Google because your links are not relevant.

Now that you understand what page rank is, let’s discuss: how do you increase page rank?

There are a number of ways but here are several of them. First, you can join forums related to your niche. Make sure to put your own signature that has a link to your site. This way, every post you make is counted as a separate link and can help increase you website’s link popularity. This also helps build your presence on the web - the more people who sees your site, the greater your chances are of having a regular stream of visitors.

Second, submit your site to directories. This is a good move as most of these directory submission sites are free. Third, you can also create articles and submit them to article directories. You can be a guest writer at a high traffic site and have a resource box at the end promoting your website.

Another method you can use to bring in targeted traffic is to buy text links from sites, which has a high number of visitors. This way, when people see the link embedded on an article, get curious, and clicks on the link, you get visitors redirected to your site! The more web text link you buy from a site, the greater your website link popularity will be! Sure, some of the visitors you receive might not purchase from your site, but the greater number of visitors to your site increases the chances of having a successful sale! Aside from this, once you build your authority on the web, this time it is the other sites, which will by web text link from you!

So you see, to increase page rank means you open new options for your site to earn income. It also allows you greater freedom since you can build high website link popularity from your home. If you own a site and do not have the time to do this yourself, there are Internet marketing professionals who can do it for you. No matter what you choose, only one thing remains - increase Google page rank and you increase your income.

About the Author

Terry is the owner of one of the internet’s most popular link building websites - www.iSellPagerank.com. To find out more, please visit www.iSellPagerank.com

July 7, 2008

SEO Software


If you own a business web site, whether it is one that sells your own products, makes money through affiliate programs, or earns revenue from hosting advertising such as Google’s AdSense, one of your key goals will be to get as many interested people as possible to visit your site. This is simply because the more qualified visitors that you get to your web site, generally speaking, the more money you are likely to earn.

As you are no doubt aware, one of the main ways that people find their way around the Internet is through search engines: people try in a phrase into Google, MSN or Yahoo (or another search engine), in order to find a site containing whatever it is they are looking for. Thus, if you can do anything to help your site come up higher in the search results for searches on relevant keywords, this will surely help to boost the number of visitors to your site.

Many people seem to think they simply need to submit their site to as many search engines as possible and simply hope for the best. However, this is not likely to be best approach - instead, a better idea may be to concentrate on the leading search engines and work on your site (a process known as “search engine optimization”, or “SEO” for short) so that it comes up higher in the results.

SEO has a reputation as being something of a black art, because companies like Google do not disclose exactly how they generate their search results. However, the core elements of SEO are well understood, and basically involve analyzing and then modifying your site’s design (and in some cases content) so that relevant keywords are placed in appropriate places (but not excessively), as well trying to increase the number of incoming links (known as “backlinks”) to your site.

The other thing about SEO is that it can be quite tedious. It may involve trawling through quite of a data from the search results and from your own site, as well exchanging links with other sites, and keeping track of all that information. These types of tasks are in fact better left to a computer than trying to do them manually yourself, and it is for this reason that if you are at all serious about SEO (and increasing your web site’s traffic and revenue), you ought to look into purchasing SEO software tools.


by S. Tanna
About the Author

By S. Tanna. Discover SEO Tools at http://www.downloadfocus.com/cat_internet_seo.php

July 2, 2008

Simplify Your Search for Page Rank and Get a Higher Position on Google


If you own a website then you probably spend time checking the Google Search Engine to see where your site appears. This can be a distracting drain on your valuable time and can ultimately make your search position worse than it should be. What should you do with your time instead? How do you simplify your SEO life and at the same time get better search results?

In a previous article I wrote about some alternative ways to use your time instead of constantly checking your search position.

What should you do instead to improve your focus? There are many, many articles, websites and books on this subject but all of the techniques are really just aimed at two goals: improving your content and improving your incoming links.

If you can master these two goals then you can avoid the distractions and keep your focus on the goal, which is to win more search traffic.

Improve Your Content

In order to be recognised by Google (and the other search engines) your website should have plenty of content. This maximises your chances of the search engines picking up pages from your site. The content needs to be relevant to your website goal to increase the likelihood of getting relevant visitors.

Your content should be interesting and compelling so that visitors notice you and keep coming back.

It’s vital to focus on doing one or two things really well on your website. You should aim to make your work the best possible, just as Steve Jobs does at Apple

Research your keywords carefully. Make them competitive and high volume and build your content around these.

You should update your site frequently by adding new pages. This gets you noticed by the search engines and they will return to index your site more frequently.

Build Your Incoming Links

Page Rank is driven mainly by links so you need to continue to gather links to your site from other sites.

Links from other sites which have a high Page Rank themselves and which are relevant to yours are the best ones.

You also need to focus on building your referral traffic. This is the term for visitors which come direct from other websites (not search sites like Google)

Here again, for referrals, it’s good to build as many incoming links as possible

A good strategy is to look at which referrers are most useful to your site. Which referrers generate the most traffic? Which ones produce the best results on your site?

Build on the good ones. Do more of the same, but find out how the bad ones can be improved. Finally, you should increase the number of referrers by finding new sources for traffic.

If you continue to build both your content and your links this will eventually result in increased Page Rank. You site will be placed higher in the search engines and you will see higher levels of search traffic.

by Dr. Richard

About the Author

You’ll find Dr. Richard via his Better Website Blog at www.infinite42.com. You can also take a look at some more Google Alternatives, or vote for your own favorites at Squidoo


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