How do you Improve your Google Ranking?

Now that we have (haven’t we?) finally buried the myth behind custom web design vs template customization by showing you how every web designer custom or not uses some form of template regardless and that the only real difference is in the tremendous amount of money you’ll pay to have a site custom made, may be we can now move on to search engine optimization and show you how to generate some real traffic over to them pages; after all aesthetics have no real relevance in search.

In this post Dyfed Lloyd Evan gives you some real insight on tuning-up your site’s PR and explains in layman’s terms how all that works and shows you lots of other helpful hints on how to publicize your site.

For the moment, at least, it seems that Google has won the ’search engine wars’. The search behemoth now has over 78% of the search engine market cornered. This means that 78% of all searches performed on the internet are done via Google.

At the heart of Google’s strategy to delivering search results is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank‘. This is named after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and is an attempt at measuring the popularity of a web page based, primarily, on the number and quality of links coming into a site. It is this algorithm that, ultimately, determines your site’s rankings within Google’s search results.

How Does Google Work? Over the years many website owners have tried to claim (some even doing so in court) that Google’s algorithm was somehow ‘unfairly’ keeping them from the top of the search engine results. The truth is that Google, as a private company, is not beholden to the millions of website owners who all want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Rather, Google is beholden to its stock-holders and needs to be seen as delivering value to them.

Google needs to earn profits and the company does this by selling advertising. The company has determined that the best way to deliver value for its advertisers is to have the best and most relevant websites be the ones that are easiest to find on the web. Thus Google’s revenues from advertising are tied to Google’s website ranking systems.

What’s Google’s Real relevance in Search? The question of Google’s real relevance in terms of how much search and other traffic comes to a webstie has been a vexed one. I asked this question of a number of my colleagues. We all have large websites in different domains and we pooled our information for the first 6 months of 2008 to arrive at the following figures…

Total search traffic 54.8% of which:
53.7% Google Search Traffic
40.2% Other main search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Windows Live etc)
6.1% Other search engines (the tiny ones)

The remaining 45.2% of our traffic all came from link sources: articles, blogs, recommendations, forum posts and links from people referring our websites.

So, only just over half the web traffic comes from the search engines and almost half comes from other links! However, the good news is that the way to garner more search engine traffic and more general ‘link referral’ traffic is one and the same!

How to Rank Well As was mentioned above, Google’s ranking system works with both the number and quality of in-bound links. One of the best ways of getting these links is to write and submit articles. Many article directories have excellent page rank and lots of site visitors. This means that submitting articles and including your URLs in them are a great way of gaining more links to your site. But they’re also a wonderful, direct, way of getting traffic to your site (remember the traffic figures above).

There are, however, a few key SEO considerations to take into account when writing your articles.

Article Links and SEO One big advantage of writing articles is that you can define your own ‘anchor text‘. This is the text in the link that defines what the person looking at the link sees. It also gives the search engine spider following the link an indication of what the page it’s navigating to is all about. This is why you should never, ever, put something like ‘click here’ in your links!

You link text should be related to the subject of the page you’re linking to, as this makes it more relevant to the search engines. Now, if at all possible the text of your links should also match the key words you are targeting on your web pages as these give the keywords more relevance and will improve your rankings for them.

Also, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that term. Indeed, if you are just starting and a keyword is very competitive (’computer’, for example) then you may never, realistically, be able to rank for it. But if you target a keyword like ‘extreme computer construction’ you are far more likely to be ranked for that term. Be clever and don’t try and bite off more than you can chew.

Indeed, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that keyword. In this case it may well take you many weeks before you will notice any effects from your article writing efforts.

But for less competitive keywords you may notice a jump of several tens of positions in your rankings with as few as 3 articles. In this case, you get out what you are willing to put in.

One thing to note is that Google takes not of all the link text that comes through to your page. If you have more than 60% of the links with exactly the same text this marks-up a red flag an your rankings may well drop. As a result you should vary the link text and you also need to alter the text surrounding the links.

Given enough time and commitment you can use article marketing to elevate any single web page on your website into multiple top spots in Google’s SERP rankings. However, this does mean that you need to write and publish articles on a daily basis. Few people have that level of commitment to their websites.

About the Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Directory where you can freely submit high quality articles. If you really want high quality back-links to your sight then you need to check out his free eCourse on How to Maximize your Web Traffic.

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