Search Engine Optimisation
5 Simple ways to increase your Google ranking
It’s clear to see that Google is the search engine of choice today, with around 60% of internet users using it daily, there’s good reason for this, Google has a good way of weeding out the best websites or web pages relevant to a search query. The more relevant the content in your site or web page the more likely it is to rank higher in a Google search. So what does a search engine look for? Google looks for the most relevant website to a search query. The key to any good search engine optimisation is knowing what search engines are looking for and more importantly what their users are searching for and optimising your site according to those key factors. There are a number or key things that search engines are looking for:
#1 Keywords and page content:
Keywords are possibly the most important thing you can do when it comes to search engine optimisation. So what are keywords? Keywords are most commonly known as the word or phrases that a search engine user would use to search what they are looking for. This is what makes it so powerful and also very important to know what keywords to use where, how and when.
The most common place to find keywords is in the META tag, the META tag or also known as the META DATA is commonly used to house all the keywords that your site’s about, it would be the first thing that search engines look for and there after scan your site to make sure the keywords that are used in the META DATA are used throughout the content of your site.
Almost equally important is the heading or rather TITLE of each page of your website. You should try to fill the TITLE tag of a page with a keyword or key phrase in a none spam looking way, in other words if you have a site selling bike spears and your key words are “filters, rims, chains, exhausts…” your site title should look something like this: “Bike spares: we sell bike filters, rims, chains and exhausts”. this way you make it sound informative as well as make it sound as if you’re using your keywords in a none spam way.
If you are making use of WordPress the easiest way to keep your Page TITLE and META DATA up to date is by making use of a plugin called All in one SEO.
Remember that the TITLE of a page is what a user sees in the search result and can only have around 60 characters in them so make the title as effective as you can. With that said you can also highlight keywords used with various HTML tags such as heading tags and strong and italic tags. Heading tags are important to search engines, they give an indication of what the web page is about much like headings in a book telling a reader what a chapter is about, filling headings with keywords is a good way to get higher rankings. Keep in mind to have a clear Hierarchy of importance when making use of Headings, it makes the structure logical and can help your page rank.
It’s important to know that search engines rely heavily on the text on a page much more then the images, videos, podcast etc. Build your content first then the add extras that compliment your websites usability. Remember you want to rank high and keep your users entertained when they get to your site. Before we move on to more in depth topics it’s important to know what users are searching for and knowing what keywords are being used in those searches, one can't assume that everyone searches the web the same way as you do so it’s important to look at search trends and the keywords used for those searches. Remember that if you understand your users it will be to your advantage, you won't just know what keywords to use but also know exactly what they’ll be looking for and expecting when they get to your site.
When writing content for your site it’s also best to not overuse keywords in a spam like way, the reason for this is that search engines penalise your ranking if it thinks you’re abusing keywords for the purpose of getting a higher ranking site. The days of long lists of keywords sitting at the bottom of your web page are long gone.
Copy should be written to be informative and useful to a user while aiming for a good keyword or key phrase density, around 5% to 10%. I find it best to write around 1000 words of copy and work the keywords and phrases in to that rather than only writing 250 words and ending up with something that’s less informative and makes use of less keywords. It also makes your page more search engine friendly by having more content than HTML code in it, also try to keep the most important keywords and information first in your content, search engines will most likely not scan through all your content . Avoid duplicate content, search engines will recognize duplicate content in a heartbeat and will consider it as spamming.
Key Points to remember:
Keywords and use of content is the most important when it comes to search engine optimisation
Make proper use of the your page title and meta tags
Highlight keywords with the strong, em etc. HTML tags
Don’t over use keywords, keywords should not take up more than 5% to 10% of your content
Make good use of Heading tags eg. H1, H2 and H3
Write good clear html code
Write for humans not for search engines.
#2 Use of links on your site
The amount and quality of Links linking to your site from another site plays a major role when it comes to page rank. The quantity of links linking to your site from other sites are far more important then the quantity. So what are we talking about when we talk about quality links? Quality links are mainly links that come from a site that already has a high page ranking on a major search engine, keep in mind that if the site that’s linking to your site is not in the same niché as yours it could be of lesser value to your site than a link coming from the same niché as your site. Quality links can also be matched by the links name, for example if the link linking to your site has a key word relevant to your site it will be of more value to you then if it did not had a keyword in it.
There are many sites out there who will link to your site, most if not all asking for compensation. There are also a large amount of sites linking to each other in a mini site network fashion, these sites and networks are called link farms, it’s a simple strategy and less effective now as Google is ignoring reciprocal links that have the same page ranking. Remember that if your content is found as useful people will link to it.
It’s also important to know when linking to another site that you make sure that it’s relevant to the topic you are covering, the quality of the site you are linking to can be important to your page rank if you link your site to random sites that are not covering what you are talking about in your copy your site might be degrade and viewed as spam and that’s a really bad thing when it comes to search engine optimization.
An added extra is the site map, a site map is like an index section of a book it tells a search engine what pages are on your site it makes it easy for search engines to know where to look when they are indexing your site, if you are using WordPress you can find many plugins used to generate a site map and keep it up to date.
Key Points to remember:
Introduce Quality links from other sites to your site
Make sure that the outgoing links from your site are relevant to your keywords
Make use of a sitemap for search engines to know what to look for and where to look for it
Increasing page ranking
#3 The quality and age of a website boosts the sites search ranking
Search engines will also take into account how long your site has been offering a service and the quality of that service. Sites that have been around longer generally rank higher if their content sits well with what users are looking for. Search Engines will also favor sub pages and find them more trustworthy if the index page (Home page) is informative and and ranks well, this doesn’t always apply just to the homepage but can also apply to sub pages, in short: if a search engine finds information on a page trustworthy and informative other pages that are linked inside that page will get some of that pages credibility.
Key Points to remember:
The older a site, the more favor it will have some some search engines (if the content is seen as trustworthy)
If your content is trustworthy to search engines, linking pages will also be viewed as more trustworthy
#4 URL Quality
In order to make your site more friendly to search engines it’s important to make all your links URL as easy to read as possible try to structure them as basic as it comes and search engines take notice that your site is made to be friendly for users. Here’s an example of a bad URL structure and a good URL structure:
BAD URL STRUCTURES: http://mysite.com/nu=post?action=mod&modnu=505&me=1 (this is very hard for a user to interpret and search engines take this into account).
GOOD URL STRUCTURES: http://mysite.com/categorypost-in-catagory (it just makes more sense to make your site as friendly as possible and so doing you’re making it friendly for users and search engines alike).
One other thing to consider is the to try to include keywords in your sites URLs this is only good practice when it comes to search engine optimisation. But be sure to keep the use of links and URLs on a page below 100, search engines take into account that if your site links to less external sites and or pages on your site that you are only linking to pages that are more relevant to your page.
Key Points to remember:
Make site URLs short and neat
Include Keywords in URLs
Use less then 100 links on a page
#5 Site and page load time
Recently Google announced that page load speed will be affecting search ranking, meaning site’s won’t just be judged by keyword relevance and content quality and relevance but also load speed. The best would be to use the free tools bellow to understand in detail what can be done to reduce your sites load time.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a free service that interprets how Google grades your site and shows exactly what you can do to improve your page load time, this is possibly the most useful application out there breaking down every call that’s made to the server, showing where improvements can be made to your site and pages. It also has the ability to evaluate two URLs along side each other allowing you to view your site load time against your competitors site load time, giving you a slight advantage.
Yahoo YSlow
YSlow has been developed by Yahoo to recognize how many server calls are made by a HTML page giving a break down of how many Kb’s are loaded by the page and by what element or elements, it’s fairly basic but a useful tool to have for evaluating load time.
Key Points to remember:
Optimize pictures as best you can and make use of sprites. Don’t make use of to many large files that need to loaded into a page Cut down on all the unneeded elements on your site and pages
Submitting your site to the major search engines:
So you’re ready to submit your site, its a easy and fast process, so here’s where to go, it’s self explanatory:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
Yahoo!: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
There are more search engines out there such as Bing, ask and AOL so look them up and submit your site on them. Just a reminder that search engine optimisation is and should always be an ongoing process there’s always room for improvement, testing etc. and with the nature of the web changing so rapidly these principles will change in the future.