Gathered information on Indexing Tips ...
Google's original ranking formula went something like this supposedly:
PR(U) = (1-d) + d * sumV(PR(V)/N(V))
Here PR = Page Rank,
U is the page we're looking at,
d is a constant damping factor and
V is a page that links to our page.
Before this scares you, it just means that the results are based on links once the determination has been met that your site has the actual search phrase/term.
Why it worked better than so many sites goes back to history. Once the web was no longer a novelty and the good and bad came along, so many good sites were "lost" in the clouds as the marketeers and spammer marketeers had overloaded "keywords" so much that search engines began ignoring them. The other search engines went more in to looking at page content. Which the good and bad marketers than began putting the kitchen sink on every page of their web sites. (ever been to a page that has a convenient "index" at the bottom of the page for your use? this is a good one, the bad ones just list the entire dictionary at the bottom. Google fixed this, it looks at WHO LINKS TO YOU AND WHO CLICKED YOUR PAGE!!! This sent all website owners scrambling to now re-market their sites, to create lots of links in their own pages, and even buy multiple domains to duplicate their content and then cross link. (smart - ever done a search just to find that every site was exactly the same text wise and just has different domain names, and slight layout differences? It's one company doing it, or even more likely, copy cats seeing their success and now "cloning" them to get a piece of the pie.) Add advertising around the top, sides, middle, and bottom and you now are collecting pennies with each view, crosslink between your sites, and these pennies are adding up to thousands of page clicks a day. You may only be talking a few hundred to a few thousand a day, but that's not a bad salary for for a $50 in domain names a year, and another $200 maybe in hosting each year.
How we'll you do depends on how much you and your business partners are willing to cross pollinate and how far down the marketing rewrite path. Let's look more at what the engine does. Obviously, you may not win as much as the "cheater" but you can still play a good game...
Google's engine does this:
1. Finds all pages matching the keywords of the search
As I said before all results must have the word or phrase on the page that is in the 1 - 1,000,000,000,000 results somewhere.
2. Rank accordingly using "on the page" factors (proximity between words, frequency, repetition etc)
Phrases and compound words for your indexing is better than individual words. You have these words very close to each other. Therefore, you will see web site pages rewritten by marketing consultants, with such phrases jammed packed until the page does read "normal" anymore. Ever seen a site, where the page background is not an image but marketing phrases covering all the "background" of the page? This is a smart marketeer.
You also want to make sure your page titles are very descriptive with these keyword phrases next to each other. One thing you may want to do is add a lot of sub pages under each thing that lead back to a main service "overview" page. Instead of "About Us" or even "About Mindwatering", the Marketeers would have you add something like "About Mindwatering Serving the Small and Large Companies with Software Development and Consulting Services Specializing in .....". The new site has all titles that are displayed as top level heading tags <H1> which Google looks as important. There is also a subtitle that can be added to each page which is basically turned off or just set to the company name or a catch phrase. This is the <H2> level. Just as important is to check each page's actual Title. This is the text that displays in the bar on the top of the browser window.
3. Calculate the relevancy of inbound anchor text
The text of the links between the <a href> and the closing </a> tags is very important. That's why you see lots of sites no longer having just cute buttons, but also put a very descriptive text string under/beside the graphic, too. They will also repeat the text and link multiple times within the paragraph until the page reads like a broken record. Linking just an image does not help your in-line anchor ranking. (This is hard for us artist types because having both text and images looks bad, it also hurts when you want cool graphics and animations on a page, instead of just a lot of marketing hype -- especially the home page. This is why some of our sites actually rank better on some of the subordinate main service/product pages rather than the home splash page.) This is why you will often see us rework "click here" links from clients into something more descriptive (like making link out of entire line/sentence).
Besides just the text, it matters how you link within your site and from/to other domains. Basically, you and every other business partner are pushing each other up through cross linking. By doing that, you are actually helping to bring yourself up, too! But not as much. As of a couple years ago, Google did not actually concern itself whether these links back and forth are within one site (domain name) or across. Therefore marketeers will actually create lots of redundant pages under main pages that link back to the main pages. (This can be good page hierarchy or it can be one of those sites where you keep clicking around in circles.
In Google, prefix your site url with "link:" in the Google search field and click search. This will give you a list/report of who links to you above a "certain rank level". In other words, these links are "higher quality links" that link to you.
4. Uses the page rank to decide what order to display the resulting sites.
We can get our page ranking by either hiring a marketing consultant to mine each page and give you a report, or you can do it yourself using the only tool I know that reliably gets it. This tool is free from Google - however, you have to install their Google Toolbar in your browser, which then of course plugs them in your browsers. (smart, very smart).
Is this it, oh no, there are more things!!!!
a. Keep URLs same case (e.g. all propercase, lowercase, or uppercase). To Google, the page http://www.Mindwatering.com/Folder/file.html and http://www.Mindwatering.com/folder/File.html are different files because of several case differences.
(Our templates are consistent, and this issue is minimalized)
b. Limit, general link hints, like "click here". Instead, if you feel you need click here, add more text to the link, such as "click here for the awesome incredible interactive personal and business web application Lotus Domino / Notes and HTML development". (just kidding, but you get the idea)
(our template is good about that except for the more option. We have the option to make the entire text a link, but then that looks really weird/bad to the visitor, so we usually choose to take the page rank hit.)
c: Add a site map, you get more links, plus the robots have one page to get to everything.
(Our template includes, this, we just have to turn it on, and proof how it presents to the user)
d. Give images "alt" and "title" attributes.
(Our templates support both, we have always tried to remember to give images an alt attribute, but only recently have been populating the other title one.)
e. Don't be a link farm, have value add
Although a link farm will give you a GREAT link results, complaints to Google from users will get you the "Google Death" sentence and their robots and engine will no longer index you. (that's when the bad marketeer spammers just continually deploy (buy and copy content) new farms).
f. Frames are bad
Framesets don't work well for indexing; staying with <div>s and <table>s for site layout is much better.
(We don't use framesets anyway as their maintenance is higher and novice clients who maintain their own web sites tend to eventually blow them up.)
g. Flash is bad for indexing
Cool graphics are great for the actual person who clicks your link, but robots cannot watch them. "Alternate text is good".
(Our templates are n/a for this as all Flash added are added as a "user" thing rather than built into the structure. How much alt text is really dependent on how much text we have to add for the alternate text.
h. JavaScript includes for menus and other content for dynamic apps is bad for indexing.
(Our new templates do some of this but for code not content. One of our old templates did, but that was back in '98 to '2000.)
i. Submit your software products onto shareware/freeware sites.
Create demo / freebie versions of software and add to major freeware download sites or open-source sites such as SourceForge.
(this is n/a for you.)
j. Don't directly link to anyone else, use a redirect folder/engine instead.
Remove this folder or engine from the robots.txt so that robots don't see this folder/engine url. Then pass all links through it so Google doesn't see this and dilutes your ranking. (In other words, make sure your own pages links to each other are seen, and you want other people's pages to link to you seen, but not your links out.)
(Our templates are n/a to this. However, we don't usually take the extra time and effort to add this. We also consider this one-side and sort of mean to those nice people that link to you.)
previous page
|