Making Your Website Google Friendly

Discussion in 'Internet Marketing' started by pradeep, Dec 17, 2005.

  1. pradeep

    pradeep Team Leader

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    Introduction



    Since Google made its debut in September 1998, the web designers, developers, programmers, and consultants of this world have been going crazy ensuring that their websites are "Google friendly". Just how do they do it? Making a website "Google friendly" refers to optimising every single element on every single page of the site by paying more attention that what you'd need for threading string through the eye of a needle. And to stay with that needle idea, once you've totally optimised your site Google will easily be able to find your needle (your site) in the haystack known as the Internet.

    In other words, if you optimise your site well, your site will rank well in Google.

    A Unique Ranking Method



    The foundation of Google's ranking method is PageRank (PR), named after Google co-founder Larry Page (not after how pages rank). PageRank works by analysing every web page on the Internet to determine how popular pages are - and that is determined by how many pages link to a certain page.

    For example, Google.com, at the time of writing this, has about 328,000 inbound links. On the other hand, TechiWarehouse.com has just 93. This has given Google a "PR" of 10 (the highest you can currently get) and TechiWarehouse a PR of 5. So to put it simply, if you search for the phrase "Advanced Search", and both Google and TechiWarehouse have this written on their homepages, Google will most likely rank higher because it has a higher PR (PageRank).

    However, PageRank isn't the only calculation Google makes to decide how high it will rank a page. Remember, PageRank doesn't mean "how a page ranks" - it's just named after Larry Page.

    So, How Can I Rank Well?



    There are many other calculations Google makes to determine the ranking of a page, including the relevance of the entered keywords. For example, if you sell fishing tackle on your website and you're located in Ohio, then you'd receive a much higher ranking for "fishing tackle ohio" if the title of your page said something similar to "Bob's Fishing Tackle - Columbus, Ohio" rather than "Welcome to Bob's Site" - even if you still mention "fishing tackle" and "ohio" later on in your page.

    And you'll receive a higher ranking, and more of your pages will be indexed, if Google can find its way around your site easily. Google can't follow links in a Flash movie, and it doesn't know what image links are saying to the visitor, so if you use either of these on your site you should try and fit in text links as well. And if you are using image links, ensuring that you include meaningful ALT tags in your images will help Google figure out what you're linking to.

    Content is another big one. If you have content on your site, Google will index it. Logical, huh? What I mean is, if you want people to find your site if they type in "bait" rather than "fishing tackle", you need to mention bait in your site. So, write an article on bait. Google will find that, see that you know a lot about bait, and so will rank you higher when someone searches for bait. But if your site only said "Bob provides fishing tackle and can be contacted on bob@bobstackle.com", Google won't know that you provide bait.

    Submitting Your Sites To Google



    Google provides a submission form at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Entering your website address in there will get you listed in Google. Or will it? Some speculate that this form really does nothing at all, and is just there to keep webmasters happy by making them think they are submitting their site.

    It's safe to say that Google depends more on people linking to you than if you submit your site or not. So I'd recommend to not worry about submitting your site, just work on getting links to it instead.

    This is my theory on it (which may or may not be fully correct):
    • If you DO submit your site to Google but you DO NOT have sites linking to you, Google will not index your site.
    • If you DO submit your site to Google and you DO have sites linking to you, Google will index your site.
    • If you DO NOT submit your site to Google and you DO NOT have sites linking to you, Google will not index your site.
    • If you DO NOT submit your site to Google but you DO have sites linking to you, Google will index your site.
    So if my theory is correct, submitting your site to Google does nothing at all. Getting people to link to your site is what works wonders. But as a said, it's only my theory and may not be 100% correct.

    Getting Inbound Links



    As has already been mentioned many times, links into your site is what influences your ranking the most. This cannot be stressed enough! But this of course raises the question: how do I get links into my site?

    Start with people you know. If you know anyone who runs a site, ask them to link to you, and in return, you should link back to them. This way, you'll both be helping to raise each other's PageRank.

    Next, write some articles about something that your site focuses on. If you are a web hosting provider, write an article about choosing a web host, and include things like: what features to look for in a host, how to tell if a host is a fake, and what price is a good price. Then at the end of your article, put a little bit about yourself, and link it to your website. Eg. "About the Author: Joe Bloggs is the CEO of Bloggs Hosting Inc.". Then, submit your article to any website that accepts articles from visitors. You shouldn't have too much trouble finding any of these in Google.

    If you submit your article to ten sites, that's potentially ten extra inbound links into your site. And not only that, you've also increased public awareness of your site and hopefully generated more traffic from it.

    A Further Important Note About PageRank



    You may have noticed that I said "potentially" above. This is because Google doesn't count all inbound links towards your PageRank. There could be many reasons for this, but the main one probably is to avoid webmasters artificially driving up their ranking by creating new fake websites for the sole purpose of linking back to their main site.

    In most cases (I have only seen a few exceptions) Google will only count a link if the page that the link is coming from has a PR of 4 or higher. So if you created a fake page and linked back to your main site, it would make no difference because the new page would have a PR of 0. If you got heaps of people to link to that, it might eventually build up to PR 4, in which case it would count. But you can see what a waste of time that is - why not just get all those people to link directly to you?

    Also, how the PR score actually works is this: the page with the link passes a portion of its PR onto the page it is linking to - and this is evenly distributed amongst all the links on that page. So say, for example, that your friend John has a site which has a PR of 6. He links to you, but he also links to five other people. Because there's six links on that page, the PR of John's site is evenly distributed among the links - so each of the sites he links to would get 1 added on to their PR score. However, Google takes into account every single link, even links to other areas in John's site. So John may be linking to six other sites, but he also has, on that same page, about 10 links to other pages in his own site. That's now sixteen links, so each of the pages he links to get a sixteenth of his PR of 6. And that's now a lot less.

    How Do I Check My PageRank?



    If you're like me, you'll like to keep an eye on the PageRanks of all your sites to see how they're doing. If you don't already know, there are two main ways the PageRank of a site can be determined - the Google Toolbar, and the Google Directory.

    To download the Google Toolbar, visit http://toolbar.google.com/. Once you've installed it, and it is visible in your browser, click the Google logo, then click Options. Make sure the PageRank option is checked, and click OK. Then, for any sites you visit, you should see a green bar which indicates the current site's PageRank - anywhere from 0 (no green bar at all) to 10 (full green bar).

    Alternatively, if your site is listed in the dmoz directory, it will also be listed in the Google directory. Simply visit http://directory.google.com/, do a search for your site, click on the category link, and then next to your site you should see a green bar indicating your PageRank. What's great about the directory is that most of the directory pages have a PR of 4 or greater, so you get benefits from the links!

    The Foundation



    I've discussed many things to do with Google in this article. Many things that help you rank better, and thus drive more traffic to your site. It is worth mentioning yet again, that inbound links are the greatest factor in determining how your site ranks in Google. So get the links, then think about what else you need to change in your site to make it more Google friendly!
     
  2. shabbir

    shabbir Administrator Staff Member

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    Some more threads related to Google and SEO.
     
  3. d6rth7ader

    d6rth7ader New Member

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    great article! thank you.
     
  4. alipapila

    alipapila New Member

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    I belive PR shows some kind of creditibilty towards your site. But want to add by saying high PR does not mean high traffic. If you have good SERP than you will get good traffic.
     
  5. clocking

    clocking New Member

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    So , the article's good.
    Can you tell me about SEO in some area ?
     
  6. bashamsc

    bashamsc New Member

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    Nice article. If i want to increase my page rank what i have to do.
     
  7. marketraise

    marketraise New Member

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    SEO is turning out to be the prime tool for internet marketing and SEO analysts are hell bent on impressing the major SE,i.e,Google.Be it in terms of backlinks,PR,listings or SERP'S (Search Engine Ranking Positions).But then not all succeed.The reason Google is not another ordinary Search Engine.Every time it crawls to cache your page or to update PR and backlinks it changes it's algorithms leaving one and all confused.So in this particular article lets discuss some basics that one has to follow to get indexed and rank well in Google.

    A]Let's start with a website that is fresh,completely new and has just got it's w3c certification done.How are you going to get it indexed by Google so that it cache's your content on a regular update.There has always been countless discussions by people regarding this particular topic,yet the problem hasn't faded away.The concept isn't still clear to all.So I just felt to put in three simple steps that would help out the newbies with their websites.

    1)First, make sure that your web site mentions the phrases you would reasonably expect an interested party to search for, as regular text in your HTML, not as a picture of text.

    2)Submitting your site to Google is not recommended at all and considered a flaw in SEO because this way you are actually telling Google yourself that your site is "new" on the internet.Remember, Google is not just another search engine. Instead it's based on a lot more complex and "logical" algorithm.

    *-The Mistake that people basically do is adding the website to Google using their Add URL page.

    3)Ask the webmasters of related web pages and sites to link to your pages, and encourage your readers to link to your site. This will bring people in directly, and it will also allow search engines like Google to find you.

    B]Now once you get going you would obviously want to feature in the Good Books of Google so that every time it's spiders crawls it caches your page.To get it done on a consistent basis you have got to understand the modus of search operandi of the spiders.

    Google Results are based on 4 major criteria

    1)Keyword density
    The density of keyword affects the ranking of your page. The higher the keyword density the higher is your rank so one should always include a 30-40 word paragraph containing key-word rich content, thus increasing the keyword density.

    2)Keyword prominence
    The keywords you have chosen should appear in title, Meta and H tags with some occurrence in the body also. So you should not define Google without putting the word Google in the body of the definition. This means H and P tags should go hand shaking with each other.

    3)Page rank and back links
    The more site links to your site better is the page rank of your site and more relevant your site is. Google also takes into consideration the words [or Anchor text] that appear in your back links
    Code:
    <A> Click Here</A> is less relevant than
    <A> Example of Google</A>


    4)Content
    Some say that the Content of your site is the king, but for me it’s actually the crown which the webmaster wears if his site has the right content. Build the content and users will be interested just be reading it.

    Once you successfully optimize for Google there would be one final frontier that you would have to conquer for making your website a grand success and that is traffic.Once that is achieved your website will start featuring in the front page of Google for the keywords you have and hence start getting more traffic and visitors.Here are some simple steps follow them and simply implement them when you do the seo for your website.

    1) Insert keywords at right place on your meta tags.
    2) Name your Images with Descriptive Titles and alt text.
    3) Use relevant text on your website.
    4) Use Ad sense to assess overall content relevance.
    5) Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.
    6) Use anchor text keywords in links.
    7) Submit your website to search engines and directories.
    8) Content updates
    9) Internal Linking Structure
    10) Link Building { One Way , Two Way and three way }
    11) Article Posting
    12) Press Releases
    13) Forums Postings
    14) Advertising
    15) Google Site map Creation and setup
    16) Blogs creation
    17) Make some videos and submit them to the larger video sharing sites like Youtube.
    18) Take part in social bookmark sites. These can get some good quick traffic (don't spam).
    19) Pay for direct advertising on sites that are on the same subject as yours.
    20) Take part in PPC advertising including Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adcenter and etc..
    21) Make an affiliate program for your website
    22) Do viral marketing by producing something with your sites link attached.
    23) Include your sites link in the signature of any emails that you send to people.
    24) Produce some business cards and get them distributed.
    25) Mention your website to your friends and family and ask them to pass it on to others (Word of mouth advertising).

    So coming to the end of the article I sum it up as my experience.I am into this game since the last year and I feel it is better to learn the game instead of being taught about it.Go ahead try the steps that I have mentioned.I doubt anybody would be unsuccessful.I wouldn't say I have mastered the field of SEO.but I have gained considerably by following these steps AND ONE LAST IMPORTANT THING-PATIENCE.Without it you will fail miserably.
     
  8. pacman1

    pacman1 New Member

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    Nice tips, in my view these days content is very important according to Matt cutts .Even if you have lots of backlinks but have lots of duplicate content than those backlinks won't take you far.
     
  9. cignusweb

    cignusweb New Member

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    Thanks for those nice informational tips... I make sure to implement them in my SEO drive.
     
  10. Saket

    Saket New Member

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    Hey, I also do agree, really nice article for the SEO. Thanks for the same buddy.
     
  11. callyS

    callyS New Member

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    Good tips there. But creating a search engine friendly website does not necessarily mean that you will get top listing for a particular keyword or keyword phrase. It is however a necessary first step if you want to rank anywhere near the first few pages of the search engine results.
     
  12. yohan

    yohan New Member

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    There are ways that helps you get index aside from search engine submissions. Here are some of these methods.

    Building Links - back links helps your site get index. Deep linking helps your inner pages get index as well.
    Creating a sitemap.
    Pinging your website or blog.
     
  13. michaelsm

    michaelsm New Member

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    Thanks for the very nice post.
     
  14. michaelsm

    michaelsm New Member

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    Thanks for the very nice post.
     
  15. shipra123

    shipra123 New Member

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    Hope we have got this information earlier. I liked the tips. And I firmly believe that implementation of same will surely produce great results.
     
  16. babaabbas

    babaabbas New Member

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    I think this article is like somebody peeling of a banana & feeding in your mouth. It is so easy explanation now all you have to do is eat the banana.
     
  17. technica

    technica New Member

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    I also prefer making my sites XHTML validated for Google. Google love XHTML valid sites
     
  18. shabbir

    shabbir Administrator Staff Member

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    Yet another myth
     
  19. sossupport

    sossupport New Member

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    I am trying to get my business website more traffic... I will bookmark this page and do everything people recommend! thanks for the advice, Jason
     
  20. vinaykumar4670

    vinaykumar4670 Banned

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    nice article & i also agree.
     

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