If you are into internet marketing and have an online business, then you are well aware that unless you have
good traffic to your site, it will be a futile effort.The more number of people visit your site,
the more business you can achieve.

There are few methods which can bring relevant visitors to your website.
To improve the search engine rankings of your site, you need to concentrate on three principles-
1-Relevancy, 2-Popularity  3-Originality.

Relevancy or appropriateness:
Relevancy is one of the key elements for the website to be search engine friendly.

• The content and links to the site should be relevant to the service you are providing or the object you are trying to sell.
  For example, if your site is about furniture, then make sure you have content that directly refers to furniture and related terms. No need to talk about the construction of a drawing or living room. Most of the search engines scrutinize websites for their relevance relating to a given term.
• The use of appropriate keywords also plays an important role to attracting visitors or traffic.
  Make the keyword unique and relevant to your topic. Also use the keyword effectively.
• The inbound and outbound links to your site are also important for the page ranking
  therefore they should also be relevant.

Reputation or popularity:
The site should not only have the relevant content but it should also be popular.
The reputation or popularity of a site depends upon its links.

• The numbers of links that are pointing to your site i.e. the inbound links are the best way to gauge the popularity of a site.
• The links should be from reputed and relevant sites.
• The more popular the link site is, the more traffic will land on your site.
• Never buy links or get links from link farms
  Get genuine links from the sites that exchange links. This will increase the popularity of your site.

Originality or uniqueness:
The uniqueness and originality of your website is also an important principle to increase its traffic.

• Spinning is a key element to keep your content unique and original.
  Change the keywords and title to get it noticed on the search engine as a new article.
• Make many versions of the content based on your keyword and host it on different servers.
  Put back links to the original article. This will improve the ranking of your page.

These few simple steps will increase your traffic manifold and you can see your business growing.

Google has in a recent statement, made it public that they have commenced using website upload speed as part of the 200 signals that determines the placement of a website in Google’s search result page.

Since the speed of a page upload shows the response time of a website in replying to a web request, Google has decided to consider site speed in their search rankings. In order to ascertain the speed of a website in comparison with other websites, they will employ a wide range of sources.

Effect of the decision on your website ranking
Math Cutts from Google affirms that the new development will affect only certain websites and that less than 1% of search queries will be altered as a result of including website speed in their ranking factor. This implies that only fewer search results will be affected.
This is because, the average search request returns about 10 search results on each page.

Although 1% seems insignificant, it may pose an issue if your website is among the webpages that will drop in their ranking. Presently, this is only applicable to web visitors who are searching on Google in English.

Techniques for Keeping your Web Pages Listed on top Google Search Results

Take a tour of these simple techniques and enhance the speed of your web pages.

• Go for a fast and dependable web host that has excellent connection to the internet. You can encounter problems by settling for a “cheap” web host.
• Merge external JavaScript code files into a single file. When the server has fewer files to request, your web pages will load faster.
• In order to make the JavaScript smaller, you need to compress your JavaScript code.
• Merge external CSS files to a single file, and then compress the CSS files.
• Enable gZip compression; but this is only if it is supported by your web server. This is what a web host can help you achieve.
• The images in your website should be as fewer as possible, and ensure that the images are compressed. A good number of graphic tools will give you the option to select a compression rate when an image is being saved for the web.
• At the end of your web pages, include tracking codes as well as JavaScript snippets.

Those who search the web are usually desirous of immediate result, and as such are not willing to wait even a moment longer. When your web pages load faster, there is an increased chance of visitors getting to see your website contents.

Web page speed is not the top ranking signal used by Google. This is confirmed by a statement made towards the end of Google’s page speed announcement; “Although site speed is a latest signal factor, the relevance of the page is weightier than its speed when accomplishing ranking”.

However, it is essential that you optimize the speed of your web pages; you also need to have other features of your web pages optimized in order to be listed on Google’s first result page.

Webmasters would do their best to get listed on Google’s first result page. However, a vast majority of them do not embark on the right techniques necessary for achieving this end.

A single strategy will definitely not get you listed among the first 10 rankings on Google’s result page. You need to work on all possible elements of your website in order to increase the chances of being listed.

Explore the top 5 factors listed below that influence your website’s ranking on Google’s search results:

1. Accessibility of the Website
It is senseless to embark on optimization of your web pages when your web pages are not accessible by search engines.

• The accessibility of the search engines to your website should be made possible by your robots.Txt file. If this file has errors in it, then a lot of search engines will not access your site, or even list it.
• Also, the underlying HTML codes of your web pages must be free of errors, the correct response code should be returned by your web server. Your web page contents should be such that the search engine spiders can read them.

Prior to your web pages optimization, verify if the contents of your web pages are readable to the search engines. This can be achieved with a spider simulator.

2. Site Architecture
Google is only interested in displaying relevant sites in the search result page. Ensuring that there is relationship between the pages of your website is a good way to be ranked among the top 10 positions in Google search results. Therefore, don’t structure your website in a way that makes it look more like a collection of random web pages.

The arrangement of your web pages should indicate to Google that your site is related to a central topic. It is necessary that the pages of your website be linked. A web visitor should be able to access your site with few clicks.

The categorization of your website contents should be made easier for search engine by the way you structure your links and directory.

3. Keywords
Among the top secrets of earning a higher ranking on Google, is the right choice of keywords. A wrong selection of keywords means total failure of your campaign.

• Different pages of your website should be optimized for different keyphrases. It is better to have more pages of your website optimized.
• Begin with highly targeted keyphrases that have different keywords – e.g. “get a cheap web designer in Chicago”
• When you have attained good ranking for your targeted keyphrases, move on to the ones that are more general – e.g. “web designers in Chicago”.

Generally, the conversion rate for targeted keywords is much higher when compared to general keywords.
Again, consider the nature of visitors that will be attracted with the keyphrase based on whether they want to make an actual purchase or just need some information.

4. Uniqueness of Website Content
If your website contents are a mere duplication of articles and links from other websites, then don’t even hope to earn high rankings.

Distinguish your site from the crowd by creating high quality and unique content; also ensure that the articles are centred on your general topic. Your website should contain useful resources.

5. Other Websites that Link to Your Website
One of the top factors for ranking high in Google is the links from other websites. But ensure that such links are from relevant and quality websites

Long tail marketing comprises of niche marketing to numerous other niches by offering each of them with small amounts of different products or services.

Long tail keywords target customers. “Long tail” was made popular by Chris Anderson in an article published on Wired Magazine in October 2004. Niche marketing and long tail keywords work hand in hand on the internet. In order to view the long tail, obtain a spreadsheet of keywords that are related, along with their searches on monthly basis, use descending order to sort the keywords and prepare a graph using the searches. You ought to discover fewer keywords with a lot of searches, as well as a long tail of the distribution having few.

A large number of us can only compete effectively for keywords that are in the tail of distribution. Now, the question is: which keywords are among those that form ‘the tail of distribution’? And how is success achieved?

The keywords can be divided for four search bands namely the low search keywords, the medium, the high and the super. You can set the boundary between the low and medium searches to something like 500 searches every month; something around 1000 should be set between high and medium; and something like 10,000 should be set between super and high.

The keywords can also be divided into four competition bands namely; the low competition, the middle, the high and the super keywords.
You can set the border between competing pages (pages that contain the precise keyword phrase) to something around 10,000 searches each month; and something around 20,000 between medium and high; then 35,000, between high and super.
Speaking metaphorically, the quality of the fruit lies in the number of searches – if the number of searches is higher, the riper, bigger and tastier it becomes.

Where the fruit lies on the tree is the level of competition. The tip top of the branches is where the super competitive words are. On the other hand, you don’t need to stretch and strain too much for the low competition keywords. Two principles for harvesting the fruit exist: the first principle is to harvest the best fruit possible, and the second targets at “picking up the low-lying fruits first”. Explore these suggestions on how to achieve that:

• Take the super high competition keywords out of your list; that traffic will not be realized.
• The keywords that have very high level of competition for the given searches should be removed.
  It’s a futile effort trying to compete with them.
• Your first target should not be the high competition keywords. Concentrate more on where it will benefit you instantaneously.
• Normally, it pays to optimize web pages manually for higher-band or middle keywords. This may not apply when selling products that have high profit for each sale – this also depends if the researcher has intention to buy.
• If you generate the pages, you can dedicate web pages to low search as well as competition keywords. By doing so, the template will be created once, but you will subsequently use it again for several keywords. Writing each one separately is not worth the effort.
• It is possible to utilize the high end of the low band keywords in the alternate topics or titles of ezine articles.
  When the articles are submitted via a submission service like Article Wizard or Submit Your Article, randomly selected variations of these articles are submitted to so many article directories as well as blogs. They allow as many alternate articles as possible.
  A lot of your articles can be circulated within the internet with titles which include the low band keywords, with little effort when compared with single article submission. The appearance of the low competition keywords in the title of a page as well as page name could be sufficient to have the article displayed on the first page of Search Engines’ search results.
  A good number of first-page listings with only some searches a piece are in the long-tail marketing spirit.
• If you search for phrases that the search engines have not yet come across, you will find many of them. A page may be dedicated as a harbour for these particular low frequency keywords. Generate a page that has so many words of text containing words and phrases that are relevant to your topic. By the time search engines come across a query that is semantically related though not indexed yet, your page could be recommended on top list. Low-competition keywords can also be dropped into the text.

There should be division of your keywords by search frequency, as well as by the number of competing pages.
It will be of great usefulness in planning your long-tail marketing.

Link building is one of the best ways of self promotion on the web. Both the inbound and outbound links play an important role in a website’s ranking process and in the resultant traffic generation. Having good indirect links on your website will improve your business and sale. The sister or related sites also help a website in gaining an increased customer flow by sending their own clients to that website through links. Link building is to be taken as an opportunity to put-forth the best things you can provide them. Link building also helps you to build a reputation in your niche market.

Some of the best ways to get good links to your website

There are very crucial features that need be addressed while building links to your website.

Your website should be your brand ambassador. You have to constantly maintain the high quality, which in turn will invite quality links to your site.

Advertise your website as much as you can through press releases, product reviews, blogs, etc. This will make your website visible to maximum people. You can also participate in the live chats at appropriate forums. Once your website is recognized by people, they will link their site to yours.

The social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can contribute a lot in connecting to the prospective buyers. Therefore, it is important to link your websites with social networking sites. Another good way is to have links of your website in your social networking profile.

A blog or forum on your website can increase your visibility and recognition in the relevant section. You can also publish your expert views and suggestions about your niche market and industry which will increase your links.

What is to be avoided

The first and foremost thing is that your website should not try and cheat the search engines. Don’t allow any suspicious data or information on your website.

Never go to automated link providers or link farms to get links to your website. Your website may get penalized for link manipulation.

Never get unrelated links or blog to your website. The unnecessary and unrelated blog comments and links will not help you in ay way. It will instead, lower your website ranking.

If you get too many links in a short span of time, your website will come under the search engine filters. Paid links or links from the spammers are to be avoided at any cost. Don’t let any spammer link to your site and do not ever put your link on any spammer’s website.

Paying attention to these few tips will get quality links to your website and will assist in climbing up the rungs of search engine rankings. Reciprocal link building may be the best option where you and your rival or competitor web-owners can exchange your links for more traffic.

Meta descriptions are the text matter that appears as snippets whenever you search for anything on the Google search. These Meta descriptions tell you about the website and what it offers in a few words. Google has earlier said that it will not count the Meta description when it is ranking any page but some recent developments have forced Meta description’s return. The new concept of personalized search has made it possible for the Meta description to return.

What is personalized search ?

Personalized search is a new initiative from Google in which they will tailor the search results of every user based on their earlier searches. This will take place even when the searcher is not logged in. Google has been customizing people’s search engine result pages since long, but they used to do so only when users were signed in to their respective accounts. Now even if they are not signed in, Google will customize their results through the personalized search.

How will personalized search affect the Page Ranking?

Well, now is the cliché. These personalized searches will actually affect the ranking of a page in a big way. Suppose a user has searched for ‘restaurants’ and visited a particular site say www.xyz.com for a number of times, then the ranking of the site www.xyz.com will improve drastically. Moreover this result will be stored in the web history of the user and whenever searched again by that user for ‘restaurants’, they will be taken first to this site only. So if a user visits the same website frequently, that website will be ranked higher in his personal search on Google.

Meta descriptions works better for personalized searches

Though Google may not consider Meta descriptions while ranking a page, Meta descriptions will affect page rank indirectly for personalized searches. If the Meta description is compelling and well written, then more people will click that website and the website will be stored in the web history of that user. When he again searches, the same website will be ranked higher so ultimately the page rank will improve.

You must remember that Google may not show whatever is written in your snippet and instead it can just show a few sentences randomly. Therefore, you must create the Meta description in such a way that each line is well defined and gripping which can convince people about your website.

Is personalized search effective ?

To be honest, there would be many people who would not like to be snooped by Google when they are not signed in. This may be taken as a breach of their privacy and security but many people would not know about this new concept of Google. Without knowing about personal search, the user will naturally click the website that appears on top of his search. But here Meta description can naturally help as he can read the snippet before clicking the site.

Expert opinion on reciprocal links

Search engine marketers have differing opinions about reciprocal links. Some of them approve of it and advocate on the fact that they work just like any other inbound links.
Others don’t approve and think that these links do no effect the position of a website in the google search results.
The rest believe that there ought to be a threshold value of not more than 33% for reciprocal inbound links.
They feel that links should not be trusted if greater percentage of a site’s inbound links happen to be reciprocal.
However, lots of experts think otherwise explaining that when high quality websites do link to each other, their rankings are not harmed in any way.

High percentage of reciprocal links are normal for some sites

Recent findings by link building experts on top sites have shown that it is perfectly normal for websites to have almost 100% reciprocal links.
Also, with more specific content comes high reciprocity percentage.
Sites based on a specific subject, link back and forth to each other and hence its not surprising that a high number of reciprocal links can also be a sign of high quality.
In this context, if websites were about different topics, then corresponding reciprocal links would look suspicious.

Does your Website need Reciprocal Links for or not?

Consider reciprocal links just as similar to any other link.
It doesn’t matter whether the links are reciprocal or not.
What matters the most is whether the individual link is a good link or a bad link.

A link is considered good if it comes from a website that is related to your website.
You can also link back to that site and this won’t be a cause for any problem.
As long as the links make sense to your website and prove useful to your visitors, everything is quite okay.

Until the recent past, your website could get higher rankings on Google with increased number of inbound links, no matter from where they came.
With Google and other search engines seeking constant improvements to webpage ranking methods, it becomes imperative for getting the right links so as to ensure being listed on the first page of search results.

Your Google rankings could go down with unnatural links

Following are the unnatural linking patterns that Google is known to detect and hence such practices don’t work out well:

Automated linking systems and Link farms

There are online services that allow you to put some code on your website or to join a system, so that, your site gets hundreds of links in a very short period of time with little effort involved.
Google detects them and considers that you are spamming.
You could be penalized for such an act and your websites position in the search results will be lowered.

Paid links

Google has made it clear through its anti-spam guru Matt Cutts that paid links would be considered spam.
You should hence be very careful when buying links. With paid links, you might lose your rankings on Google.

Your Google rankings improve with natural links

Natural links are sensible links.
If you have a website about Sassy Baby products, a totally unrelated link to a Vacation Rental website would just look strange.
With more related websites linking to your site, your website ranking on Google’s search result pages would get higher.
Your website should be linked to related websites and must have links from sources that seem to “naturally” link to you like blogs, social bookmarking services, internet directories, etc.

5 Steps for getting better links to your website

1. Your website has to be worthy enough for links

It is easier it is to get links from other websites if your webpages are really interesting.
Webmasters will link to your site only if your website is replete with good content and not with just a collection of many affiliate links.
With “Top 10” lists, “How to” articles, or even a controversial statement, you would end up with web pages that get good inbound links.

2. Related websites and blogs have to be contacted

Include an article on your website that solves a specific problem.
Initiate contact with related websites and bloggers who have written about that topic, and make them point to that and other interesting content on your site.
You could well be on the process to excellent link building.

3. Submit your website to related Internet directories

You can get easy inbound links by submitting your website to related and relevant Internet directories in the right category. This would bring about a positive impact on your Google rankings.

4. Have the social bookmark services to facilitate adding your website

Create an easy option for visitors to bookmark the link of your website.

5. Link to different pages of your website with varying link texts

Links to the home page of a website quite often helps to get direct links to the web page that need be promoted on search engines.
Links can e to different potential pages as well.
Such links from the related websites should use different but relevant texts to link to your site.
Web pages using same text to link to your site would look quite unnatural.

You have to make sure that your web pages are user-friendly and interesting by creating interesting and link worthy web pages with optimized content.
It is extremely important to have the right kind of links for higher ranking on Google and other search engines.

Google’s Response
Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, commented on this question and has said that keywords in URLs can help a little with search ranking. He also said that over-emphasizing these keywords, including too many in a URL, or putting to much emphasis on the specific order of the words is unnecessary.

Yahoo’s Response
A patent application filed by Yahoo in early 2009 entitled “Techniques for Tokenizing URLs” [Patent Application #20090083266, available online from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office at http://www.patft.uspto.gov ] contains information on how search engines get keywords from URLs.

When the search engine tries to determine a page’s relevance to any given query, it looks at the content of the page itself but also at the words used in the page title to give it more clues. Given the detail listed in Yahoo’s patent application about extracting keywords from URLs, it appears that Yahoo, too, take keywords in URLs into account when determining search relevance and, therefore, ranking.

Balance your Use of Keywords
It can be helpful to use some of your target keywords in your URL. Just don’t overdo it.

]]> http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/rankinf-factors/would-using-keywords-in-the-url-of-your-website-help-or-hurt-your-search-rankings/feed/ 0 http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/rankinf-factors/important-ranking-factors-part-2-of-2/ http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/rankinf-factors/important-ranking-factors-part-2-of-2/#comments Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:49:24 +0000 admin http://aceinternetmarketing.ie/?p=467

While on page optimization is important, of equal important is off page optimization.
This can encompasses many areas and should be thought of as a continuous process.
It is not enough to build a few links and expect your website to rank high in the search engine results pages.
Here are some of the most important ranking factors:

Incoming Links
This is obviously one of the most important aspects of off page optimization. Where it was once thought that Google exclusively ranked pages on the basis of the number of high page rank links, this is not quite the case anymore. While links to your website from sites with high page rank are beneficial, Google now uses a combination of all incoming links to help determine your rankings. Therefore, do not turn down a link to a relevant site just because it doesn’t have a high Google page rank. A good mixture of links to sites with varying page rank will work well.

Rate Which Links Are Built
It was originally thought that the faster you built links, the better. This is not the case either. If you build links too quickly, Google is likely to think you are using artificial means to create links. If your website suddenly goes from having 50 links to 3,000 links in a week, Google will probably penalize you.

Age of Links
Just as the age of your domain will affect the rankings in the search engine results pages, the age of your links will affect it as well. If you have established links early on to reputable sites, you are on the right path of good rankings. Also, avoid asking for the anchor text to be changed.

Expert Site Boosts
If you can garner a link to a .gov, .edu, or even an .info site, hold onto them anyway you can. These expert sites can provide a tremendous boost to your rankings. While it’s not certain how much they will help increase your rankings, these are considered the absolute best when building links.

Age of Domain
When you register your domain, it’s best to register it for five years. Most throw away domains are only registered for a single year and Google is well aware of this. It shows Google that you are serious about the domain when you register it for five years.

Number of Pages
It used to be a common perception that many pages on your website would help your rankings. However, with computer generated pages, this may not be the case so much anymore. Use only the number of pages necessary, as excessive pages may be considered “spammy.”

In Closing
All of these factors work together when it comes to your rankings in the search engine results pages. While some factors are more important than others, it’s imperative that your SEO campaign address all of the above and other less important issues in order to get the best rankings possible. If you are not comfortable with these procedures, you should contact a professional SEO company for assistance.