How to Rank higher in Google
When you try to find something on the Internet what do you do? You open internet browser, type your keywords in Google and Google shows you pages of search results related to your keywords. Usually results on the fist page contain all the information that you are looking for so you don’t need to look beyond page two. Search engine’s job is to provide the best results for your searches. Google checks the quality of the contents and reputation of the site before presenting them to the users.
For an example, when I type “search engine optimization” in Google, it returns me almost 25 million results. If you are blogging about “search engine optimization”, depending on your site’s reputation and quality of the content compared to other existing contents on the same topic Google will give you a position for the key word “search engine optimization” on the search results. If your site doesn’t rank well in Google your page will be buried somewhere in that 25 million results.
How often do you think people go through 25 million search results?
To do better in Google you will need to understand how Google works. As you can see there are 25 million pages on the internet have the keywords “search engine optimization”. I did a bit of study on this. Logic behind Google’s search engine is very simple but people have turned it into a complex matter to make business out of it. I had the opportunity to attend “Wordcamp” last year where Matt Cutts head of Google’s Web spam team did a 50 mins lecture on search engine optimization. I will try to explain what I have learnt from the seminar.
Google considers few things before ranking your website. If you want to do better in Google you will need to consider the followings:
Page Rank:
Google ranks your pages from 0-10 depending on how important the content of your pages are. Google measures the importance of your pages by the number of links from other websites that are pointing to your site and the importance of those links. The links have to be relevant and also reputable. For an example Site ‘A’ has 120 incoming links and site ‘B” has only 50 incoming links. Site ‘A’ is getting all the links from his school friends’ blogs but site ‘B’ is getting the links from BBC, New York times and other important sites, which site will do better in Google do you recon?
When a reputable site sends you a link, your site receives a portion of its page rank. The more page rank your site gets, the faster you are likeably to be found, search engine crawler will dig deeper into your site and your site will get crawled more often.
How to get page rank?
There is no easy way. You have to work hard for your page rank. You need to think about why a reputable site will offer you a link? You need to have quality contents in your site. At the beginning you should concentrate on two things. Write some quality contents for your site and other reputable sites that are relevant to your site. Offer them your article to publish on their site. If you have quality content no one will turn you down and you will get your valuable links. Don’t fall into link collection obsession. Every link is not good for you, you need some quality links.
Keyword optimization:
Before you write a post think about whom you are targeting and what you are covering. This will give you an idea how people will find your post on the internet. Selecting the right keywords is very important, because people will find your post by typing keywords in search engine. So make sure you have all the right keywords in your post but don’t over do it. Use the keywords naturally in your post. As long you have all your keywords in the post at least once, Google will find your page. Also do a keyword research. Google Addwords is a very useful tool. If you put your keywords in the tool it will show you other relevant keywords that you might have missed or never thought of it.
Keywords in Permalink and the header
Google gives high importance to the keywords that are in your permalinks, post categories and in the header. Check the permalink structure of your blog. If it is set to default then you might need to change the permalink structure.
By default the permalink structure will looks like http://www.yourblogname/p=25
After customization it will look like http://www.yourblogname/category/post-title
Always put your post title in the header and make sure you got the right keywords in your post title. Because you will be using the post title in the permalink too.
Be interesting:
Try to be unique and write about new stuff rather than writing the same thing that million other people are writing. If your post is interesting and you have new unique stuff, you will have less competition for ranking. More people will read your post and link to your site.
Write often:
You don’t have to write everyday but make it a habit of writing something new at least once or twice a week. The more you will write, your writing skill will get better and better and you will start writing quality posts. People will visit your site more often for new stuff. If you update your blog very often Google also crawls you site regularly. I actually didn’t write for one month and when I restart writing it took almost a week to get my post indexed by Google before my posts used to get indexed with in an hour after submission.
Start small:
Always start with a small niche. Don’t try to be famous in one day because it wont happen. Be a Big fish in a small pond than a small fish in the big ocean. Start with a small niche and you will have less competition. Build your credibility first and more people will start to recognize you. Then move to the next level.
Build reputation:
If you are good at something show your expertise and share it with everybody. Let them know that you really know what you say. Do some original research work and publish the results. Write codes for open source applications that will help people. Create controversy but make sure you can back it up what you say.
Video updates:
Videos rank well in Google. Creating a video post is less time consuming than writing a post. People like to watch a video than reading a three page long article. These days its very easy to create a video post with your camera.
Use Google tools:
Google Analytics is a very useful tool. It gives you in depth information about your blog traffic. You can find the posts that are getting most hits in Google Analytics. Its worth spending time on those old posts to update and polish them up to make them better as they are generating your traffic.
You can also see the bounce rate, which tells you how many people are leaving your site after spending how much time. Don’t let your visitors leave your site so easily. Offer them to read more posts on related topics. Choose the tags properly between the blog posts.
Make your site crawlable:
Most of the old websites are built in Flash. Google crawler cannot read the contents in Flash. The more information Google can get from your site, the better rank you will get in search results. If you are using old HTML Flash template style websites I would recommend you to upgrade to WordPress. WordPress automatically takes care of 80%-90% of Search engine optimization and it is very crawlable.
If you follow these you will definitely do well in Google. But don’t expect that it will happen overnight. Be consistent of what you are doing and you will see the outcome. Don’t listen to the people who say they can help you to get better ranking in few days, it doesn’t work like that and I know it from experience.
WordCampTV Matt Cutts: Straight from Google – What You Need to Know
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4 Responsesto “How to Rank higher in Google”
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This article helped me to clear my misunderstanding about Google page rank. Thanks for sharing the video too.
You are welcome Deepika, all the best with your site
Thanks for this article, i actually gave me a couple of things to think about, even though it’s not a new article, but i found it through, yes you guessed it, google
Hahhahahahah you are damn right Andreas
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