Optimize your site for Google! Tips and Tricks!!

Well, probably the most popular SEO topic in the recent had been in discussion about improving the Google rank; since Google is the No.1 web site referrer on this planet. Although there are no quick-giant-leaps or magic beans to improve your site’s ranking, in this article, I’ll focus on some of the most important points-to-ponder about improving your Google rank.

The Google says, “The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.” So, this PageRank algorithm is the heart-cum of Google ranking system. Although PageRank algorithm is a top secret, Google gives away some general insight into the system. You can view it here: http://www.google.com/technology/

If you want to find out what your Page Rank is, then you should download the Google Toolbar. It’s the only method.

Today we will look discuss about optimizing your site for Google Spiders! And going along with the topic for the day;

 

Improve your Link Popularity

Link popularity is cruicial when determinig your Google Ranking. The more links you have pointing to your pages, more popular your site is. More popular your site is, it’ll have a higher ranking. And moreover, if considered ‘imporatant’ sites by Google (Sites that have a higher Page Rank) link to your site, it’ll have more of an impact in improving your rank than a site with lesser rank linking to your site. So, populate your links as much as you can. Especially, don’t hold back to do a few Link Exchanges with sites that have a relatively higher Page Rank. But, if you’re just strating off, you can always submit your sites to open directories like DMOZ and etc.

There are some complex optimization factors to be described in this section. So you can see some more posts in near future, specifically addressing this topic.

 

Make your Static Links and Dynamic Links more meaningful

Optimize every link you can find. Does your site have links as http://yoursite.com/view.php?page=2 ..? Well, now is a high time to make it look like http://yoursite.com/view.php?page=how_to_improve_your_google_rank … Take a look at my blog. Take a look at your address bar. See? The page that you are viewing actually has the key-words in its referral link. And that helps a lot. When Google indexes you site, it’ll have a high tendancy of identifying what your page is really about. And this will help more targetted visitors to your site.

And also, it’ll be a huge advantage if your domain name also has the relative keywords. Google will rank me higher in a search done for “shoes” if my domain is “fancy-shoes.com” other than “fancy-living.com”. And also, give your static pages meaningful names like “shoes-for-summer.htm” rather than “page1.htm”…

 

Rule the world with META Tags!

Optimize your Title and Description tags. Keep a clear concise title including relative key-words. And a good description covering everything about the page it contains focuses. Google highly respects a good Title and Description Tags. But Google ignores META keywords. Yeah! That’s right. It completely ignores the keywords. But just because Google ignores it, just don’t let the keyword tags astray. Many search engines still do use them. But then again, putting too much effort in optimizing your keyword tags rather than Title and Description Tags is just a effort-in-vain.

 

Guide those spiders with a site-map…

Giving the Google spiders a sitemap to crawl your site can do wonders for you. First and foremost, it’ll lead them to every corner of your site and secondly, it’ll give your visitors a concise look at your site. Make sure you place that Sitemap somewhere in the home page and it contains less than 100 link per page. Make those links look as meningful as possible, with relative keywords. Make one optimized XML version if possible, so that spiders will absorb the most required essence of your site.

 

Name those ALTs!!!

If your site contains a lot of graphics, use their ALT Tags wisely. Spiders can’t see the picture. Google or non-Google. But it can smell it with the optimized ALT tag. When spiders know what that picture is about, it’ll help your keyword-density. (keyword density? one minute mate!) So instead of namin the Alt Tags “picture1”, “picture2”, make it “Classic summer wear shoes: Design #1”. And when naming those pictures, JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs, give meaningful filenames. It’ll furthermore help the keyword density. And also, it’ll make sure your images appear higher in a relative Google image search result.

 

Roll those keywords…

Last but not least, make your content meaningful AND KEYWORD-ful. Google’s Page Rank algorithm considers the keyword density in a page and a number of other factors also, such as repetition. For an example, I want someone to visit this page, who’s looking for means to improve their Google Page Rank yeah? So I should be focusing on the keywords “Google”, “Rank”, “Improve”, “Optimize” yeah? Well, just see how many times I have laid them in the content. The word “Google” alone had appeared more than 25 times and “Rank”? 20 times! And I’ve spreaded them in a controlled frequency. That’s what keyword density is about. But if you want your shoe site to work, having phrases like “shoes, shoes, shoes….. for the 86^th time shoes” and bragging you have mentioned shoes for 86 times in a page is just an attempt to get your site black-listed.

This is a valuable lesson I learnt from John Chow and Steve Pavlina both. Both my inspirations to blogging. “People first. Google second!”. Write for people first. Then optimize your site for Google in a way, your visitors don’t get hurt! Good luck…