SEO
Wow, where to start? A whole industry has risen around optimising your webpages to ensure the highest possible ranking in Google.
The following tips and tools do not guarantee success but they should help.
The main thing to remember is that the sites that rank highest in Google have:
- Interesting content, and are
- Linked to by other well ranked websites
Promotion
Again, books have been written about promoting your website and generating visits. Some of the recognised ways are:
- Purchase Google adwords so your advertisement appears separate from the search results
- Ensure you use an email address associated with your website AND,
- ENSURE YOU ADD A SIGNATURE containing your website address
- Contribute to forums and make sure your website address is mentioned in the posting. If people like what you say they may visit your site.
- Start a blog on your website. A blog is a useful way to ensure the content of your site changes. It also encourages others to link to you.
Interesting Content
Usually content that is interesting to humans appears interesting to the search engines, having said that there are a few things you can do to improve its appearance:
Keyword Analysis
<meta content="keywords, seperated, by, commas" />
Competitor analysis
Is your goal to be the best, or to be above your competitor? A useful tool to help here is Page Comparison. Just find the site that is ranking high and compare its pages with yours. Can give some useful pointers to improve content.
Keyword ideas
If you have just added new content and wonder what the best keywords to use would be then the Google keyword tool. Also useful if you decide to take part in Google's adwords pay for placings programme.
Linked to by other well ranked websites
Beware of everyone who offers "Holy grail of Google rankings", "top-secret way to rank in Google",.... and every variation of the above. Often all they offer is link to your site from one of their "up to 200 directories, guaranteeing inbound links".
Google and the other search engines know all about this and you are more likely to be blacklisted. In fact, it is one of the way unscrupulous webmasters use to demerit their competitors rankings. They can damage their competitors placing by fraudulently submitting their competitors site to one of these "200 directories".
If you want to improve your rankings then avoid "Link farms", "Link directories", "Link exchange programmes", and everything that just swop links. Instead concentrate on building proper links by creating an attractive informative site that others will want to link to.
Check your inbound links by typing
link: yourdomain.co.nz
into your browser location bar.
Other ways to increase the number of links to your content:
Pagerank
Pagerank is the ranking Google has given your page. This can change over time as Google fine tunes its search engine.
The easiest way to keep track of this is to add the Google toolbar and enable the Pagerank display widget. You may not wish to leave this on all the time as it may slow your browser, especially if you are using a dial-up connection.