How Does Google Rank Web Pages

Writen by Gerrick W

This article discusses how Google rank pages in order of relevance and importance. It is not a secret or sure formula that guarantees good ranking. However, understanding how one of the most popular search engines rank pages will help you to strategize your web pages to rank well. Ranking well on Google need not be a shot in the dark exercise. All you need is to understand Google's scoring system and work on your web pages accordingly.

When someone performs a search query, Google needs to do 2 things before it presents the results according to ranking. Firstly, it finds the pages that contain the search query term and ranks them in order of relevance. Secondly, it determines the importance of each page. The final ranking results are combinations of relevance and importance. Remember the 2 keywords relevance and importance, which form the heart of Google's scoring system.

Relevance

How does Google define relevance and rank pages for a particular search query? Well, if someone do a search query on 'internet marketing, Google will look up its index for pages containing the words 'internet and 'marketing'. Web pages' relevance will be ranked accordingly to the following criteria...

1.Pages that contain the 2 words 'internet' and marketing will rank higher than those that only contain either one of two words.

2.Pages that contain the 2 words 'internet and marketing' right next to one another and discuss internet marketing will be deemed more relevant than pages that discuss marketing in general and only mentioning internet marketing in passing.

3.Page titles that contain 'Internet Marketing' will give Google a hint that they are more relevant than others.

4.Also a page that contains the term internet marketing several times is likely to be more relevant than a page that contains the term once. (However, do not overstaff your web page with your targeted keywords or else you may be penalized for keyword spamming.)

Google uses your page titles, and content to determine the relevance of your web pages for your targeted key phrases.

Importance

After having retrieved pages from its index that contain the search query, Google will now determine the importance of the web pages through its Pagerank algorithm. Pagerank basically evaluates 2 things: The quantity of links to web page from other web pages, and quality of the web pages from which the links originated.

These two factors, quantity and quality determine the importance of a web page. With Pagerank, emphasis is placed on quality over quantity. Four or five quality links from websites like adobe.com or cnn.com would be valued more highly than twice as many links from less reputable websites. And of course, a web page with a lot of quality links will boost its importance significantly.

As a rule of thumb, Google uses relevance and importance to rank pages. It will find pages that are relevant and reputable. If two pages contain the same amount of information that matches a search query, it will give a higher ranking to the page that has more quality links. Still Google has given higher ranking to a page with fewer links or lower Pagerank because of its onpage factors - page title and content. For example a page that focused on 'internet marketing' is more useful than a page in a reputable site like cnn.com that only mentions 'internet marketing' in brief.

Once Google has consolidated a list of web pages with their scores, it will select those with the highest scores as the best matches for a given search query.

Gerrick W mailto:gw@1stinternetmarketingsolution.com Information and Software Tools You Need to Effectively Promote Your Online Business. Visit: http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com

Ten Steps To A Well Optimized Website Step 2 Content Creation

Writen by Dave Davies

Welcome to part two in this search engine optimization series. In part one we covered the importance and tactics for choosing the keywords and keyword phrases that will provide the highest ROI for your optimization efforts. In part two we will discuss how to properly write content for high search engine positioning.

Content is the key to search engine rankings. While there are numerous factors involved with the search engine algorithms, content remains a constant in stable rankings for a number of important reasons.

Over this series we will cover the ten key aspects to a solid search engine positioning campaign.

The Ten Steps We Will Go Through Are:

Keyword Selection (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/articles/search-engine-positioning/keywords.htm)

Content
Site Structure
Optimization
Internal Linking
Human Testing
Submissions
Link Building
Monitoring
The Extras

Step Two – The Importance Of Content

There are many aspects of your content that are of key importance to your search engine rankings and for a variety of reasons. That said, they can be broken down into their three main benefits. The three main things you should be targeting with your content are:

Unique and well-written. The search engine spiders are looking for unique content and your visitors are looking for well-written content.

With articles come links.

With quality content comes even more links.

As long as you keep these three main purposes in mind while you are deciding what you want on your website and how it should be worded, you will fill this area nicely.

Unique & Well-Written Content

The importance of unique and well written content cannot be overstated. This is the backbone and purpose of your website's existence and it deserves the time it will take to create. When you are considering what content you want on your site (or what content should be on your site if this is part of SEO or a redesign) you will want to make a few considerations.

What does your audience want to find?

Will you have to do additional research?

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

What Does Your Audience Want To Find?

Assessing your potential visitors wants does not require a crystal ball. If you have completed and spent quality hours on Step One of this series, fully researching your keywords, you are already well on your way. Delving into those keywords you will often find hints that will push you in the right direction.

If you have an acne site and you have found a number of people searching for "acne treatment" and "natural acne treatment" and have thus chosen these as your targeted keyword phrases you already understand your visitors current situation and more importantly, their desire. Similarly, if you are a real estate agent and have chosen "los angeles real estate" as your phrase you know more than simply characters strung together and dropped into a search box. You know that you are dealing with people wishing to purchase or sell a home in Los Angeles. In both scenarios you know what your visitors want and, assuming you are already successful in your industry, you know what you have to do to convert that desire into a client.

Now what has to be done is to create solid, compelling content that will both grab your visitor's attention and at the same time, make them want what you have to offer. This is not the same as selling to them when you have the opportunity to speak to them face-to-face. You are working without the benefit of watching their expressions, speaking to them about their objections, or even understanding whether they are looking for information for a friend or if it is they themselves who require your services.

This leaves you with a lot of room for content. In the online environment you have to deal with every question before they ask it, and make every person feel that you can help them even though you've never met.

What does your audience want to find? They want to find a solution to their problem. How do you provide that? By supplying them answers to the questions that they don't have the opportunity to ask and may not want to give you their email address to find out. FAQ pages are good but often used as sales pages, which is fine so long as you are still providing good content that your visitor isn't reading as "sales" but rather "solutions". Perhaps create pages of replies to emails you have received. Perhaps place a related "fact of the day" on your homepage with a link to an archive of facts related to your industry, product and/or business. You might even want to add a blog to your site. Regardless, give your visitor the answers they're looking for and keep this information updated as you get new information and you will stand a much better chance of keeping that person surfing through your website. The longer you can keep them on your site, the greater the chance that you will build trust and once you've got that, you can help them with the solution to their problem.

Will you have to do additional research?

For many business owners the gut instinct to this question is"no". Of course not, you are an expert right? Well you may be, and so is Professor Stephen Hawking (http://www.hawking.org.uk/home/hindex.html), however my bet would be he still does his research.

No matter how much you know there is always more out there and your visitors are probably well aware of that. If you fail to address all their questions, your visitors may very well leave your site in search of the answer. Once they've left your site it becomes other webmasters who now have the opportunity to present the benefits of their products or services.

Find all the information that you can and make sure that you include as much as possible on your site. The additional benefit in doing this is that constant new information on your website will not only keep visitors coming back to find new information but the search engines spiders too. If your site changes often the spiders will pick up on this and will visit you more often. While this by itself will not improve your rankings it does give you an advantage. The more often search engine spiders visit your website the faster changes you make will be picked up. The faster these changes are picked up the quicker you will be able to react to drops in rankings. If you know the spiders visit your site every second day and you drop from #8 to #12 you know that with proper tweaking to your content you may be able to recover that loss in as little as two days.

Are you an expert writer or do you have one on staff?

When you need a doctor do you read a book entitled "Heart Surgery For Dummies" and buy yourself a very sharp knife. Of course you don't and while your website may not be quite as important as your heart, it is how your company is being perceived online. This perception can be the make-or-break of all your online marketing efforts.

If you are committed to attaining high rankings, to making money online and/or promoting your business through your website, shouldn't you also be committed to insuring that your conversions are maximized. High search engine positioning is important but so too is converting those visitors once they get to your site. You may be an expert in your field but if that field isn't writing, and you don't have a writer on staff, be certain to at least consider hiring one to make sure that your website is conveying the message you want in verbiage that your visitors will understand. Assuming you choose your writer well you will not only have a well-written site but you will also gain the advantage of having an outsider, who is more likely to write for people who aren't experts, creating your content.

If you feel that you are qualified to write your own content (which you may very well be) be sure to have it proofread by someone from the outside. Find someone (ideally plural) from within your target market and demographic, and have them go through your content giving suggestions and criticism. Don't take it personally, every change they recommend is earning you extra money. Whether you implement the changes or not you are learning something new about what people will want and expect to see on your site.

With Articles Come Links

Writing content is not just an exercise for your own website. We all know that inbound links to your site help rankings. Additionally, if those links can be ones that provide genuine targeted traffic you're doing very well.

There are a number of methods for driving traffic to your site with paid advertising, PPC, etc. however one of the most cost-effective methods is to publish articles. Article writing is no simple task however the rewards can be enormous. Articles server two great purposes:

Increased Link Popularity – When you write an article and submit it to other website to post, they will generally link to your website from the page the article is on. Here's a completely legitimate, relevant, and quality link to your site.

Exposure & Credibility – The added credibility that article writing lends to your business coupled with the added benefit of the visitors who come to your site directly from your article are invaluable.

When it comes to article writing there is little in the way of more effective advertising. You will have to find sources to publish those articles on, but once you've done this time-consuming task you can reuse the same list for future articles.

Get those articles on a number of quality resource sites and enjoy watching your stats and your rankings improve.

With Quality Content Comes Even More Links

Yet another benefit that derives from having a website with great content and writing articles is that, with time, your website itself will become a resource. If you provide great information that other people will find useful people will link to it naturally.

With so much emphasis in recent times on reciprocal linking some might think this is the only way to get links at all. Believe it or not there are still webmasters out there who will link to sites for no other reason than they feel their visitors will be interested in it's content.

Build a good site with quality content, keep it easily navigated and create sections for specific areas (articles for example) and you will find that people will link to your site and may even link to specific articles or your articles index. Perhaps then your articles index is a good page to target an additional keyword phrase.

Next Week

Next week in part three we will be covering site structure and the importance it plays in your rankings and in visitor experience. This will cover getting a spider through your site while also giving your visitors an easy path to the pages you want them on.

About The Author

Dave Davies is the owner of Beanstalk Search Engine Positioning (http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/). He has been optimizing and ranking websites for over three years and has a solid history of success. Dave is available to answer any questions that you may have about your website and how to get it into the top positions on the major search engines.

info@beanstalk-inc.com

Linking Strategies To Skyrocket To The Top Of Google

Writen by Greg Furey

If you don't know already, one of the key success factors to getting loads of free Google traffic to your website is increasing page rank. So just how do you increase your page rank? Well, it's all in the linking.

To be honest I never could quite figure this Google thing out, how it ranks good sites from bad sites. One day it all clicked for me and its so simple when you look at it from Google's point of view. Google keeps its customers by providing relevant sites to your search queries. How does it choose the best sites for what you are looking for? Well, first of all it needs to be relevant (key words) and secondly it needs to be useful and of high quality. One way Google knows to measure quality is by the amount of links referring to your site. It stands to reason a site referred to by 100 websites may be more useful than a site referred by just a few right?

So how can we increase our sites chances of shooting up the search engine rankings with incoming links?

The quality of the links you receive is very important. Choose websites that firstly are related and preferably with a higher page rank than your site. The higher the quality link the higher page rank you will receive. In other words getting a link from Amazon.com is going to be worth more than a link on your daughters home page.

Basically there are 3 types of links, Outbound links which are easily added to your site, Reciprocal links where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A, and finally inbound links. These inbound links are the most important of all.

Let me describe how to get links in order of their importance.

How to get incoming links

1. Write articles like this one. Choose a topic you know and write up a short 500 word articles with a link back to your website and post it to article directories. Not only are these one-way links but other websites will pick it up and post one way links on their websites. Google gives you a big tick for each one way link!

2. Viral marketing. Ask other website owners directly if they would like to post your article either on their website or include it as part of their newsletter. If it's a good article chances are readers will in turn pass this on to other readers providing advertising for both you and the other Webmaster. Like a virus, it spreads to more and more readers who may post the article, providing more one-way links.

3. Post to forums related to your area and include a link in your signature file. It is critical to join in the discussion and not blatantly advertise, as this can look unprofessional and self-gratifying. Add value to the discussion and simply provide a link in your signature. Visit some forums and see who you would link to in the discussion and try and copy what they did right.

How to get reciprocal links

Ask Webmasters directly. These are a little easier to ask for as its clear you are providing them also with a link. Best to first link to their website, then personalize the contact commenting about something on their website specifically. I have found personally calling them if you have the contact phone number the best method. My friend David Newton at www.simplysolo.com has found this an invaluable way to gain in excess of 1,000 inbound links for his site. Simplified it should go like this:

a. Find a relevant site as a potential link partner. Tip – Try entering this into google "your keyword or phrase" + "add url". This will then list the most popular sites that will allow you to link back to them.

b. Firstly create a link to their website

c. Contact them directly showing them your link to them with url of their site and something you liked about their site, something unique. Compliments can only help here.

d. Schedule to follow them up in one months time and try again if necessary. Best to keep a spreadsheet

Of course not all sites will link to you and it's a bit of a numbers game but you can get results. Its better to personalize your contact than mass e-mailing a general group of websites.

Don't forget to always be polite and keep up a schedule where you will aim to get say ten or twenty links out there per week. You will then have quite a collection after a few months and traffic should start flowing to your site.

Greg Furey is the owner of The Affiliate Program Centre – Resources and helpful tools for businesses and website owners to increase sale through affiliate marketing. http://www.affiliateprogramcentre.com

Webmasterfriendly Google Operators

Writen by Bradley James

There are a lot of operators (commands you can enter in the Google search box to return specific results) you can plug into Google in order to find what you want. For webmasters and website owners, however, a few particular operators can be especially useful. Operators can be used to locate potential link partners, evaluate current inbound links, and determine what pages of your website still need to be added to the index. Here are the operators we think you should know:

link:

Simply enter this operator followed by your full url (including http://) with no space. Ex: link:http://www.googleadvisor.org

This operator is one of the most popular and widely used. It simply shows you what (and how many) webpages within the index have a link to your url.

Using this operator, you can also plug in the url of your competitor(s) to see what sites link to them. These websites may be a good place to start in your search for link exchanges (or even one-way links).

site:

This operator will restrict all results to webpages within the domain or website you enter. For example, if you enter site:googleadvisor.org you will find all of the webpages of this site that are listed on Google. This a good operator to use if you want to see just how many webpages of your site Google has indexed, and likewise, how many pages are not listed - the ones you may want to submit, or resubmit, to Google.

allintitle:

Here you enter the operator and some keyword that you are interested in. The results will show you websites and webpages that have that keyword(s) in their title. For example, intitle:google will return all sites that have google in their title, including Google Advisor. This may be used to once again find link partners within your subject area, and to evaluate possible competitors.

Similarly, you can also use intitle: if you want to do a similar search, but open your results to those webpages with the keywords in their content as well . For instance, intitle:google advisor would give you all sites with google in the title and advisor somewhere on the webpage.

info:

This operator is not terribly useful, but its interesting to see what you find. Simply place your url in front of the operator like info:www.googleadvisor.org to get a Google page with your website title and desciption. The page will also contain links to your website's cache, related websites (you can also use the related: operator for this), and more. If your website is new to the index, and you are not appearing for any keywords yet, this is an easy way to find your website and confirm that it is indeed listed. Note: some operators like related: will not work for new websites.

To obtain the full list of operators, visit: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

We hope these few operators mentioned above will be of the most use to you as a webmaster or website owner.

Bradley James is the Webmaster of GoogleAdvisor.org [http://www.googleadvisor.org], an informational site providing free information to casual searchers and Webmasters about the Google search engine.

Search Engine 101

Writen by Gerrick W

What's a Search Engine? Oohs.

It is a program designed to do basically three things.

1. Gathers copies of web pages from the world wide web.

2. Stores the copies of web pages in its index or database.

3. Looks up its huge database of web pages to find matches to search query, and ranks them in order of relevance.

For example if you go to Google search and type in the words 'search engine' and hit the enter button. Immediately, the Google Search Engine starts to query its huge database and try to find web pages that matches the search term 'search engine', and ranks them according to relevance.

Ranking according to relevance is determined by the Search Engine algorithm (specific requirements). Every Search Engine has its own peculiar algorithm.

Basically there are 2 types of Search Engines, human edited directories and crawler-based Search Engines. The operations of these 2 types of Search Engines are different.

What is a human edited directory?

As the term suggests, a human edited directory depends on humans to review, approve and compile its listings of web pages. The Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project (DMOZ) are examples of human edited directories. You submit a short description of your website to the directory. Search results only show matches in the descriptions submitted. Changing your web pages does not have any effect on listing in a directory.

What is a crawler-based Search Engine?

First and foremost, let's understand what's a crawler? It is one component of a Search Engine that automatically 'crawled the web' to gather listings. The Search Engine 'crawler', which is also known as 'spider' or 'robot' visits a web page, reads it, and follows links to other web pages. It gathers copies of web pages and stores them in the Search Engines index (database). When people type in a search term the Search Engine looks up its database of web pages, and uses its specific algorithm (specific requirements) to determine which pages closely match the search term.

Crawler-based Search engines, gathers and creates listing automatically. New web pages are automatically crawled and indexed, and changes made to existing web pages are also automatically updated. If you make changes to your web pages, the crawlers will find these changes, which in turn may affect the ranking of your web pages.

For a crawler based Search Engine, it is the crawler that does the work of gathering and compiling the listing. Google is one example of the many crawler-based Search Engines.

Practically speaking, you don't have to submit your web page to Google. Google's crawler, Googlebot will find your web pages. In fact, Google's crawler does a more efficient job of finding and indexing web pages. Just for peace of mind, however, you could submit your web page to Google to be indexed and ranked.

For smaller crawler-based search Engines, you still need to submit your web pages for listing. Upon confirmation of your submission, crawlers are sent out to index your web pages.

Human edited directory like DMOZ, which is a free listing directory, depends on humans to review, approve and compile its listings of web pages. DMOZ is staffed by volunteer editors. There is a massive backlog because everyday thousands of new web sites are being submitted for listing. It used to take anywhere between 2 to 6 months to get your web site listed. It may take longer now. The backlog of paid commercial directories is smaller compared to DMOZ.

Recommended article for reading: Who powers whom? Search providers chart http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156401,

Gerrick W – mailto:gw@1stinternetmarketingsolution.com Information and Software Tools You Need to Effectively Promote Your Online Business. Visit: http://www.1stinternetmarketingsolution.com