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I have two words in my title and description meta tags that I do a search on in google. These two words also appear several times within the content of my text on my index.html page. Although there are many sites that do not have both of these words in their title and description, and also these words do not appear as many times in their content for the page in question as my site does, my site comes up as 91 in the index, way behind these other pages.
My questions are, what other factors can I tweak to increase my ranking? Does ranking also have to do with how long a specific page has been listed with certain formatting in google? And also the popularity of the site? Or am I missing something.
Thanks for any info.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld.
There dozens of additional factors that contribute to rankings. The most important being links. I'd suggest you start by browsing through the Google Knowledge Base [webmasterworld.com]. That will give you a basic understanding of how Google works. From there, I'd go visit A Successful Site In 12 Months [webmasterworld.com]
[webmasterworld.com...]
Has Brett updated this since Sept. 2002?
Thanks for the info guys and welcome wagon! I was just reading the post at [webmasterworld.com...] -
I pasted it below - excellent info! I have just a simple three page site and it prob will never get bigger than ten pages at the most. Also this site I'm trying to increase rank on is a virtual IP, same IP as the server ip address set up in my apache httpd.config file.
This site (front page) has a google page rank of 4.
This site comes up number one with three keyword search for most of the 3 keyword sets I am targeting, which is great; I want to try to get it in say a top 30 ranking for a two keyword search, that would be great too.
Will virtual IP's greatly affect ranking? What should I be doing to increase rank for a small site with a virtual IP? I can get an IP but my co lo firm wants me to justify it, and I only get individual IP's for e-commerce sites on my server which need SSL certs and have to have individual IP's for the certs.
I only have three or four insite cross links on the three pages on my site, but one page is a links page to other outside sites, links for related topics, and that one has over 300 links on it to other sites. Is that page with outside links reducing my rank? That is a popular page on my site, many people use it but after reading the below I was thinking maybe I should get rid of it or place it under a different domain?
Or should I just be adding a bunch more of in site cross links, or maybe even put everything on the same page? Have one big page on my site with all the 300 outside links on index.html, think would that increase ranking?
Or lastly, my index.html page is rather large - plain html text, a huge story. Would I be better off breaking it up into several smaller pages and create a huge menu of insite cross links and place it on every page? With different page titles for each page pertaining to the content of that page? Would that be best for my sitiation?
Thanks for any ideas U might have.
"H) Insite Cross links.
(cross links in this context are links WITHIN the same site)
Link to on topic quality content across your site. If a page is about food, then make sure it links it to the apples and veggies page. Specifically with Google, on topic cross linking is very important for sharing your pr value across your site. You do NOT want an "all star" page that out performs the rest of your site. You want 50 pages that produce 1 referral each a day and do NOT want 1 page that produces 50 referrals a day. If you do find one page that drastically out produces the rest of the site with Google, you need to off load some of that pr value to other pages by cross linking heavily. It's the old share the wealth thing. "
Will virtual IP's greatly affect ranking?
As far as I know this shouldn't be a problem. I see sites on virtual IPs that rank very well.
But I could put a fantastically optimised page about Homer Simpson on my travel-related site and I'd never rank anywhere for the term "Homer Simpson". It's the fact that other high-quality sites think your page is about Homer Simpson that makes you rank really well.
So I was wondering then, would it be cheating or does google check whois records, which server a domain is located on, etc. to see who owns domain names?
In other words, if I created a few new related sites (hehe) and did out bound linking on the new sites to the site I want to raise the rank of, would I be penalized for this or is this considered spamming by google? Or if all the domains use virtual hosting with the same IP address, would this raise a red flag in google?
If I did this, am I correct in thinking that the related sites need to be similar in content to the original site I want to raise rank on? Also what does "Similar Pages mean? When I click "Similar Pages" for any site, are the sites listed the ones with outbound links to the site I click "Similar Pages" for? Is that how a site becomes a similar page to another site?
Don't be an idiot - there is such a thing as ethical SEO and it's perfectly possible to rank well without resorting to underhand tactics. You'll only gain yourself a penalty and the wrath of many on this board.
[webmasterworld.com...]
In other words, if you create a closed network of sites, only linking between themselfes, you are bound to get in trouble.
If you put up several sites, which all can stand and rank independantly, then interlinking should not get you into trouble.
So when you say the inbound anchor text, do you mean it's important to have the text in the inbound link on the other site match keywords you want to rank high on for your site? Also is it the inbound links that decides if a site is a similar site to my site?
Making new pages/sites and carefully linking between them can help some of your pages rank better, but excessive internal cross-linking is widely believed to be risky. By "internal" I mean links that are under "common administrative control", regardless of domain, IP, whois info, etc.. No one knows how much is too much, but I think the dangers are greatest if that's all you've got with few outside links coming in.
I can't prove that, but quality external links are A Good Thing no matter what. The way you'll get them is with 1) good content and 2) diligent promotional work.
So when john talks about the inbound anchor text above, does that mean it's important to have the text in the inbound link on the other site match keywords you want to rank high on for your site? Also is it the inbound links that decides if a site is a similar site to my site?
Yes, that helps a lot. You want link texts that say assorted things like "blue widgets" "buy widgets" "buy blue widgets" "good blue stuff" etc. to support your on-page optimization for "Blue Widgets". There's a bonus here for the linking site: a link with descriptive anchor text is more meaningful than a "Click Here" link for a person accessing their site with an audible browser reader.
This is something to aim for, but a Click Here link will pack just as much punch for PR so far as anyone can tell. So you don't have to weep if some sites want to use different anchor text to suit their own style or SEO aims. Some variety in the link text is more "natural" and Google probably evaluates that somehow!
One thing I'm fanatical about is always asking people to link to exactly the same form of the URL, regardless of anchor text. There are enough reports of people noticing different inbound links, different PR etc. for variant URLs that I think it's wise to try to focus one's link pop on one version.
I always ask people to link to [mysite.com...] not [mysite.com...] [mysite.com...] etc, and that's what I do in my own links too. I even asked Yahoo to take out the www. bit they added to a site I submitted a few weeks ago, because I had submitted [mysite.com...] . I think either the www. version or the non-www.version of your URL, is okay, as long as you're consistent.
