Page Rank and inbound links

Your site is crawled by the search engines, and your site is associated with certain keywords, strings, and sentences. When somebody performs a search, the results are made up of all the sites that match the keyword/serch term. The order in which they are displayed is what we’re interested in.

The more optimised your site is, the higher it will be positioned.

In order to be positioned highly in Google, you need 2 things:

• High level of relevancy
• High PageRank

The relevancy is something you can’t really control. If you have a site about cars, its gonna be about cars, and not about flowers. If you have a site about tropical fish, its not gonna show up in results for concrete mixers. You get the idea.

Google PageRank is used to determine your position in the search results. The Higher the rank, the closer your page will be to the number 1 spot.  Quite basic so far. Now lets go over the basics of improving your PageRank.

Inbound links

An inbound link is  link from another website to your website.  If the web page (note: page, not site) linking to your site has a higher PageRank than the page it is linking to on your site, then that will slightly increase rank for that particular page. If the inbound link is from a page with a lower PageRank than you, then it will very slightly decrease your rank. They say the exception to this is if a large number of inbound links from lower ranked sites come in, you will see a boost so don’t worry too much about other sites “draining” your PageRank just yet.

There are a few ways to get inbound links. Google prefers that you get the inbound links from having high quality content that people will naturally link to because, well, its good quality content. Some people will pay other high ranking sites to link to them, thus increasing their rank, but Google is not too fond of this.

What the majority of people do these days to get a quick boost, or a few extra links in, is to leave comments on blogs, forums and any other website they can, and leave their link somewhere in the comment. This is slightly effective, though very time consuming if you want to get a lot of different links.

The easiest,  albeit slightly controversial, way to get a quick PageRank boost is Link Exchange. This is controversial as Google frowns upon webmasters paying other sites for ranking boosts. Google would prefer you get your links from users genuinely linking in to some good relevant content. If Google suspects you’re doing dodgy dealings, it may remove your site from its listings.

Incidentally, keywords are also taken from the text used in the link to your site. For example, if someone links to your site like this: Cool new SEO blog then Google will take not of the words “Cool”, “new”, “SEO” and “blog” and so if someone searches for a topic and includes them words, your site will come on for inclusion. However, if somebody link to your site using click here or something similar, then it will be of no help, in terms of keywords. It will benefit you still from the actul link itself though, so don’t worry yourself too much!

Helping Search engines find your content

Now that you have a site, and have submitted it to all the major search engines, you just need to sit back and wait for them to come visit your site. However, when they do come to your site, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find all your key data and web pages.

Start off by making a sitemap. A sitemap is basically a list of all the web pages on your site.  It can be tricky to create your own, so for now you can use the automatic sitemap generator at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. This will work on any site that has less than 500 pages. You will be given a sitemap.xml file to download and then upload to your website. I’d also recommend you submit it to Google in the Webmaster Tools Sitemap section.

Once Google or Yahoo! come to your site, they will read this sitemap and have a list of all the main pages to crawl. If you don’t have a sitemap, the robots will have to discover all your pages itself, which could take a while.

It is also recommended that you name your web pages so that the name is relevant to the content of the page. For example, look at your address bar now. You will see the address of this blog post is http://yetanotherseoblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/helping-search-engines-find-your-content/

You will notice that the address is pretty much an explanation of what is contained on this page. This will help with your rankings as the page name will match the content. A bad example would be to have “page1.html” or “car.html” as both do not have relate to the content. They may not reduce your ranking but this is all about optimising. These tips will aid in doing so.

Another way to get robots to crawl your site is by getting inbound links from other sites.

You have a site – What now?

OK, so you’ve gotten yourself a website and are now looking to get started on boosting its search engine ranking. This blog post outlines the first step you should take.

Step 1: Submitting your site to search engines.

Search engines work by running software on their side that scours the internet for links. The software follows these links and reports back what it finds. You can either wait for someone to link to your site, or you can tell the search engines yourself about your new site. This is a no-brainer. Definately tell the  search engine about your site. It will get indexed a lot quicker and you will start appearing in search results within days, insteads of weeks/months.

Every search engine has a different method for receiving site submissions.

For Google, you can submit a site here. But I recommend you sign up to Webmaster Tools too. This site is invaluable for telling you if there are any issues with your site hampering your chances at getting good traffic to your site. You can then fix the issues and optimise your site yourself. It also tells you how people are finding your site, ie what they search for in Google that makes your site show up. Very useful for capitalising on the search terms.

For Yahoo!, use SiteExplorer. This is not as advanced as the Google tools but still useful in submitting your site for indexing. After all, Yahoo! is not the number 1 Search engine, but its still used by a lot of people, so much so, that is would be silly to ignore.

For MSN, it is pretty basic. You simply submit your web address to Live Search and you’re told it will be added to the directory at some stage in the next week or so.

Ask.com – The current 4th largest web search. Submission here is a bit tricky. First you need a sitemap. These will be covered in the next blog.

Once you have one created, visit the below site, substituting the values for the ones relevant to your site.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YourSiteName/the URL of your sitemap here.xml

eg

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Cuil is a new web search engine claiming to be the biggest in the world. It certainly has the most number of websites indexed. At the moment, there are 124,426,951,803 web pages indexed! Thats quite a lot!

Anyway, Cuil website submission page.

A lot of other search engines use Open Directory to power their searches. Submit a site to Open Directory.

Also, it may be useful to you, or it may be not, but Chinas largest Search engine is called Baidu. Google only has about 27% penetration in China so its a good idea to submit to Baidu, especially if your web site content is relevant to that continent.

Wrap Up

OK, so now you should be able to submit your website to the top search engines. They’re in the process of doing their job, and all thats left for you to do is do your job and make a decent web page with quality content. Quality, relevant content is the key from here on in.

First step: Getting a website

First things first, you need a website. This is easily done and I will show you where to get one in a minute. What you need to now decide is what sort of content you will put on this site. If its a blog site, you can get them for free on www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com, as well as countless other sites out there. If you want to create your own website, then you will need web space. This basically involves paying a company for some space on their server to store your web pages. These days, you can get sites really cheap so you shouldn’t have to break the bank to get some space.

A quick google search for website hosting and voucher codes will find sites linking to cheap hosting, who also have discount voucher codes. Thats a good tip because voucher codes usually save you a decent percentage of the full price.

For example, here’s a link with 3 months free hosting:

Cheap web hosting with discount voucher codes

Now, once you have webspace, you will need to come up with a domain name. A domain name is basically the address of your site. For example, in the address www.google.com, the domain name is google. Also, it is a good idea to try get a .com suffix on the end, as opposed to say .net, .org, .biz, .tv or whatever else your hosting provider offers. The reason for this is simply that when somebody thinks of a company name, the first thing they’ll search for is company name.com. Later on down the line, if you choose .net for example, somebody might come along with the same name and buy a .com address. This will inevitably result in your traffic being sent to their site instead of yours, and that is a headache you do not need!

Tip: Keep your web site name short. Nobody is going to remember “www.websitetomakeyoursiterankhighlyingooglesearchengine.com” so keep it short! Also, keep it relevant. If you’re selling flowers, don’t name it after electronics or car manufacturers! That just confuses search engines, which will in turn hurt your rankings.