Schewanick Computer Services

by Chris Ridings
Probably one of the most important things to have when starting a new site is a high search engine ranking. With most sites, search engines can account for up to 95% of traffic. If you're not placed in the first three pages, it's unlikely you'll get any traffic from a search engine. Google is one of the fastest growing search engines, a high listing here will guarantee you traffic. Google's results are also used by Yahoo when it's finished displaying its own results. To get a high ranking in google you need to design your pages and promotional methods around it.
First let's look at how google rates pages, obviously their exact ranking system is secret but the following gives a fair idea:
1. Google works using PageRank. This is a system that allocates a page a score depending on it's importance. This is calculated by looking at all the pages that link to it and how important they are. The more pages that link, the higher the score. The greater the rank of the page pointing to your site, the more it contributes to your page's rank. To quote some of the original google researchers: "For most popular subjects, a simple text matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results". This is important. This tells us that the two most important things to ranking in google are the page's PageRank and it's Title!
2. If a page links to your page (which point 1 tells you is a requirement to any reasonable ranking), then the text of the link to your page counts towards your ranking!
3. Google makes extensive use of "Proximity". This means google looks at pages and can tell how close key words are together. So if the searcher enters "antique spectacles", then the text "antique spectacles" in your document would help slightly more than "antiques and spectacles" and much more than "antique items which include many things such as spectacles". There are ten levels of proximity that words can have.
4. Google looks at visual presentation such as: size of text to the rest of the document and boldness of text.
5. Each keyword is looked at and ranked: Title, anchor, URL, text in a large font, text in a small font. Each applying a different weighting.
6. Each of the factors above are calculated in with different ratings. The format of your page has a large effect to start off with but quickly tapers off so a finite limit is reached (i.e. you cannot just fill your page with hundreds and hundreds of copies of perfectly formatted text). This implies that the rule of each keyword applying 3 to 7 times in each 100 words should probably be okay.
So your approach to getting a good ranking on google should be to design and submit your page as follows.
1. Pick your keywords.
2. Ensure your keywords are included in the Title of the document, they MUST be placed next to each other for a good ranking. If this isn't the home page (i.e. index.html etc) then name it after your keywords. i.e. keywords-here.html. If your domain name includes the keywords then all the better.
3. Repeat the keywords near the top of your page using header tags or at least a large font. Again, make sure they are as close together as possible. ("Antique Spectacles" is better than "Antiques and Spectacles")
4. Design your site with as many pages as possible. Page size doesn't matter but remember that the effect of keywords tapers off so it's probably best to make 300 a maximum. Try to repeat each keyword 3 to 7 times for every hundred words.
5. Keywords should be repeated throughout the whole site, not just the page. Use links back to the home page with the keywords in if possible.
6. Ask as many sites as possible to link to you. Get them to use your keywords in the link text. Forget about Free For All Links or Link Farms, Google considers them spamming and may penalise your site. Do a search for similar sites on google and start trying to get links on the sites that are shown, in all probability they have the high PageRank score that'll help you most. You want LOTS of links.
7. Submit. Also submit to Yahoo, yahoo has a very high PageRank (if you can get on!!).
Good Luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This article was written by Chris Ridings, webmaster of http://www.goodlookingcooking.co.uk and editor of the "Free Ezine Content" Ezine: http://thinkbig.at/ezinecontent and also The Richer Times Ezine:
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