How can I get higher google Page ranking on my site?

[Felice Romkema]

Google Page rank is a huge part of all SEO practices. My question is, what are some things I can do to help my new website rank higher and yet not do something that might look like "black" SEO?

Thanks!

[AitchB]

Getting high page rankings on Goggle (or any other search engine for that matter) is extremely time consuming and there are many different opinions on how best to do it. And you have to do it continually.

Here is my input.

First and foremost is your actual and real website content. That includes the actual text, the captions on your images, the "alt" text on the images, your Page Titles (not just the first page) and your website Description. Having decided what your keywords are, do a search with them and look at the title and description that pops up. You will see what is pleasing and attractive and remember that only the first so many words are shown so a long description is useless. People will glance at it and quickly decide if it is worth a visit. In Firefox you can load a website, go to Tools/Web Developer/Page source to see what your competitor has for his Title", "Description" and "Keywords" Firefox also has some useful tools you can try out such as debugging.

It will depend on what software you use to "build" your web pages as to how you add this info. However you also need to know what people are likely to search for in order that your page appears in the first page of Google. If I have a luxury rental villa for holidays, which I will use as an example, I would write into the text, words like "luxury, rental, villa, holidays and vacation if it is aimed at the USA, AND of course where the villa is: France, so I might add a page in French, America, I'd use American spelling here and so on. Then I'd make a page about the place using (in correct English grammatical form) all those words again. You can expand this to multiple pages all on the same subject. Remember that one word in UK English like Holiday is NOT an American used word so if you are targeting foreign countries use the words that they would use. I hope you get the idea. This applies to any type of product. This is also what is called SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

It was important once to use keywords in the "head" of your HTML document. I still do as it costs nothing but Google say that they are not as important any more. However looking at other sites HTML and the source code gives you a complete list of their keywords. You may well be inspired.

Headline tags are also important. They are the visible titles on your actual web page not the "page title" Use H1 H2 etc.

Correct spelling is VERY important. I noticed that you used 2 tags - SEO and General. But you spelt that last word wrong. As a tag it is now useless.

If you are using software like Dreamweaver you need to make sure your HTML Hyper Text Mark-up Language is correct and do validate it. If you use JOOMLA or another CMS type website tool the software does that for you. You can still check and alter the HTML code. Many search engines can't index a website that has HTML errors, which lessens the amount of traffic your website gets from search engines because their spiders can't read your pages properly.

Next, when your web pages are done, you need to reference them with the search engines. You can use some free automatic referencing programs but they tend to send your details to obscure directories. Best is to physically go to the majors one by one and register your website with them. See Google HERE Others have their submission pages. You also need to

Back links, when a site refers back to yours with a link, are considered important by Google. However there are websites that offer back links that are frankly useless. The most effective back links are those that come from similar sites so if you do a search using search words that you think OK see what websites come up. Fine tune this until you start getting sites that sell your type of product. Then contact some of those and similar websites and ask nicely if they want a reciprocal back link.

Start a Blog and choose a blog name (address) that reflects your site. Use say Blogspot which is a Google company. I created a blog for a wordgame and used the title wordswithfriendsmytips.blogspot.com at the last count I had over 500,000 visits. I never referenced the site just had great content and a relevant website address.

This, is not an exhaustive list but a start and I bet there are many more people out there who will add to this.

Just remember what I wrote in my first paragraph above.

[Steve]

Write great content, use a good blogging platform like Wordpress and stay active on other blogs in your same category.

The backlinks will come as will google traffic.

Oh - also don't forget to read all the tips on my new blog (coming soon) http://groovyblogger.com