Improve your Google Page Rank
Improving Google's page rank is tricky business. You need to think like the people searching for you, focus on the quality of your content, and BE POPULAR! Google works through "citations"... the more sites that "cite" your site, and the more popular those sites are, the more popular your site will be.
Simply putting a website up and hoping for traffic from google just won't work. You need to use ways to get your site noticed, and within the top 2 pages on google. Otherwise, you are merely a needle in a very large haystack.
In order to improve your page rank, you need to do a number of things. Before we get started, you need to keep the following in mind:
- Focus on your content and metadata for each page of your site
- Focus on the quality of your content, keeping it keyword rich
- Use Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF)
- Use a Google Sitemap
- Put links to your sites on as many popular sites as you can (including social media sites)
- DON'T USE AUTO-Submitters
Lab and Excercises
Step 1: Create your Site
You can create your site a number of different ways. Here is a good article on creating a website. Make sure you turn on Search Engine Friendly (SEF) links (Google much prefers URLs like mysite.com/product/ipod rather than dynamic URLs like mysite.com?product=ipod). Also, if you are using one of the free services, make sure you get your own unique domain name to point to it so it becomes your site.
Step 2: Submit your site to Google
Google, by far, is the most popular search engine. It accounts for 90% of internet traffic. You can submit your site to google using the google webmaster tools. You will need to be the owner of the site you are submitting, NOTE: It can take up to 90 days to get indexed. In the meantime, you can focus on preparing your site and links.
Step 3: Focus on your page content
Google indexes the text and images on your page. In order to get highly ranked in google, you need to focus purely on your content in your pages, not on your site. Each page that google indexes is a separate entry. Therefore, you need to focus your attention on your content. the first thing you need to do is understand what your content is about, and how people might find it. Come up with your keywords and description (metadata) first. These two parts of the content are stored in the html body of your page, in the <head> section. Here is an example:
<title>[A keyword rich title for your page</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="[enter a list of search terms or phrases that people would search for]" />
<meta name="description" content="[An informative and keyword rich description]" />
These tags need to be placed between your <head> and </head> tags of your page. If you are using a content management system for your website, there should be options for changing the metadata for an article or content item. Each page should have relevant entries in these three metadata fields.
Once you know your keywords and description, write your article using as many of the keywords as you can within your page. Go back and tweak your keywords and description. Remember, you must think like someone who wants to find your page, not the page author to come up with appropriate values in these two fields. The title is equally important. Try to put some of your important keywords in your page title. Your title is actually indexed at a higher level than the description. Don't just put in a generic title, it won't get people's (or google's) attention!
Step 4: Use Google Sitemap
Crawlers work by loading a particular home page of a site, and following the links. To help the crawler out, you can add more data about each page through a Google Sitemap. Here are some tools to create a google sitemap:
Once your sitemap XML file is created, you can upload it to your site, and use the "Add Google Site Map" feature of google webmaster tools. Your site will be indexed faster, and more efficiently. You can also change each page's priority for the crawler to access. This gives you better control at the content (page) level, rather than merely relying on the crawler to determine. You can also use a robots.txt file to limit which pages/directories should get crawled.
Step 5: Use the Social Media sites to add a backlink
Create accounts with the popular social media sites, like Facebook, twitter, and linkedin. These sites are very heavily indexed by google, and will increase your page rank. Make sure your link is on these sites. Also make sure that you put your link on as many sites as you can. A good technique to do this is to do a search in google for one of your keywords/phrases you came up with, and look at the top 10 results. If any of these resulting sites contain an "add link" or "Market your site" feature of any kind, these sites have already gotten high ranking in google. Therefore, by simply adding your link to their site, you are adding a quality "cite" reference to your site, increasing your popularity and your page rank.
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