RANK HIGHER IN GOOGLE

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RANK HIGHER IN GOOGLE

Author Onur Özcan
Published October 17, 2004

One of the biggest issues webmasters face today is figuring out how to get traffic to their websites. Unfortunately, the volume of traffic (i.e. number of visitors) a website receives does not really depend on how great it looks. So, you might have designed the most beautiful website on the Internet, but no one will know it even exists if you can not generate web traffic.

According to statistics, search engines produce 95% of total web traffic on the Net, and Google is the most popular search engine, sending millions of visitors to a tremendous number of websites every day. Therefore, ranking higher for a relatively popular keyword (or "keyphrase") in Google is the key to getting targeted traffic to your websites.

Keyword Density & Website Theme

The first rule of ranking higher in Google is to build your websites around a single theme, picking a good keyphrase and using it throughout your web pages. For example, the keyphrase for Online Web Design Course is, yup you got it right - "online web design course". However this keyphrase also contains two more popular key phrases: "web design course" and "web design". Therefore, it can be asserted that the whole website revolves around the theme "web design", but is highly relevant to the "online web design course" and "web design course" keyphrases.

Picking more than one keyphrase will only dilute the relevancy of your site for all of the keyphrases you have picked, so it is best to pick only one keyphrase/theme and stick to it. So, if you have a site about "kung-fu techniques", but you wish to throw in a few pages for "aikido", just get a new domain name and build a new website for "aikido". Do not dilute your "kung-fu" website with irrelevant "aikido" information. But then, you can always pick a wider niche such as "martial arts" and put all the "kung-fu" and "aikido" stuff in there :)

Of course, website relevancy is not enough on its own to rank higher in the Google search results - especially for the keywords with a higher competition level (i.e. more popular keywords).

How Google Ranks Web Pages

Google uses a highly sophisticated technology called PageRank (PR) to rank web pages within a scale of 0 to 10, where web pages with a PR closer to 10 are considered more "important" than those that are close to 0. In order to view the PR of web pages you visit, simply download the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com).

The below two paragraphs, which briefly explain the PageRank technology, were taken from the official Google website:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query. (Retrieved October 17, 2004, from http://www.google.com/technology/)

What this means is, the more/relevant/important web pages link to the web pages on your domain (i.e. www.yourname.com, etc.) the higher your Google PR will be - and the higher your web pages will rank in Google search results for keywords that are relevant to your website. Therefore, do not expect to rank high for the keyphrase "grocery store" with a website about "cat food" just because your website has a high PR ;)

Building Reciprocal Links

In order to get a higher PR, we need to get other relevant & important web pages link to our own website. How do we do that?

A "reciprocal linking campaign" will generally do the trick. "Reciprocal linking" is basically trading/swapping links with other webmasters, which is a win-win situation for both parties. You simply add their link to your website and they add your link to theirs, resulting in a better PR for both websites, provided that the websites have a similar theme. Online Web Design Course trades links with web design companies, web design courses, webmaster resources, etc. to get a higher PR, for instance.

Reciprocal linking is generally done by setting up a "link directory" on your website, where you classify the websites that have traded links with you and put them into different categories. Check out my web design directory to see what it may look like.

After setting up a link directory, you simply search the Net for webmasters that may be interested in a link exchange with you. The more relevant and useful your website is, the better the chances are for a successful reciprocal link exchange. Note that many webmasters have their own reciprocal link directories and will list your website there. This means you can do a Google search for "reciprocal link"+"your theme" to find potential link partners :)

Building Non-Reciprocal Links

"Non-reciprocal" links are the hardest ones to get, as they are generated by webmasters that link to your website because they find it useful - not because they expect a link in return. So, if you have a really useful article on your website, you can politely ask your readers to link to that article to get non-reciprocal links pointing to your website - just like I'm going to do now: If you've found this article useful, please link to it :)

Non-reciprocal links also have a positive effect on your Google PR, so do create quality content for your readers to succeed in your quest to generate traffic to your websites; as this is the most important factor for succeeding online.

To your success,

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RANK HIGHER IN GOOGLE!

RANK HIGHER IN GOOGLE

Keyword Density & Website Theme

How Google Ranks Web Pages

Building Reciprocal Links

Building Non-Reciprocal Links