SEO Tips to Improve Your Rankings

I would like to share with you a few tips to make your site SEO friendly and to score better with no minimum SEO skills on your end. Positioning on search engines can rely exclusively but not wholly to a few critical factors known as onsite (internal SEO) and offsite (external SEO). Internal SEO can be all the content your website contains from navigation building, text, images, layout, structure and more) Below are a few factors that can help your site to score better with no minimum SEO skills on your end.

Keyword selection and research

Take all the time available to research for all your keywords and phrases to use for your SEO campaign; keywords that best describes your area of business, products/services you are trying to promote.

Amount of text per page

Search Engines love pages with a broad content. A website with a long text content and information is in a good chance to get a better ranking than a competitor website with poor content. It is best advised that you can increase your content and text up to 2000 words per page. Write as much as you can about your business, services and use at least 3-4 times the keywords that you are targeting.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is a combination of the number of times a keyword or a phrase appears on your page. The more times the keyword is repeated on your page, the more will its density will be. In a 100 word content, a keyword that repeats 6 times counts 6% in density. The less the density is means that search engine will ignore the term in a search on the particular keyword or phrase. It is best advised to keep your keyword density between 5-7%. Anything over can flag as spam, best known as keyword stuffing

Title and "Alt" Tags in images

When it comes to images used in your website, search engines do not have the ability to read images so it is very important to keep a clear and descriptive title on all your images used in your website, typically in a one sentence of 20-30 characters if possible.

Use text for navigation

As i previously said, search engines do not have the ability to read image content to your website. If your navigation menu consists of images for any reason, search engines will not be able to index the text used on images and it's links. It is best advised to build your navigation with text links instead of pictures.

Use a Breadcrumb Trail (Internal Navigation) for every page created

Breadcrumb Trail is a navigation aid that gives users a way to keep track of their location within a website. Using Breadcrumb trails on all pages is a clearcut, standardized way of backtracking from any page, back to the homepage or reversed. You follow the breadcrumb trail back home, so to speak. This is a great way of "explaining" your site structure to Google and other search engines. A breadcrumb Trail helps to keep your website well organized and structured to search engines

Choose a keyword rich domain to use for your website

Choosing a keyword rich domain related to your targeted keywords can be another significant and important tip to achieve better rankings on search engines. Search engines tend to trigger keywords used in your metatags (keywords,description,title) but also in your domain used for your website as well. Go and search for a term or keyword in Google or any other search engine and you will notice that some of your results are triggered exclusively on their domains used rather than their description and titles instead.

Header Tags

Header tags are heading tags in HTML that search engines pay critical attention to them. There are 6 predifined headings, ranging from to which tells a visitor and search engines the topic of the web page. It is best advised that you highlight your main titles and assign a header tag on each giving priority to your main title where H1 and H2 are the strongest and most significant header tags to use in SEO. It is also recommended that you use keywords in your headings for maximum visibility and exposure of your primary targeted keywords.

Avoid Hidden Text

Hidden text is when a text has a similar color to your background color and in result it is invisible to humans to see but visible to search spiders to read. Due to an increase use of hidden text by spammers to increase and boost their keyword triggers on a search, all major engines changed their policy when it comes to hidden text crawls. Consequently, the use of hidden text may result in banning your site from any search engine and should be avoided.

Andrew is an SEO expert and President of iTarget Media, an Orange County based SEO and Web Design Company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrew_Kiriakos

Rank High On Google: How To Increase Google Ranking

Welcome back, I'm George Tiganus and today I will tell you some things about how to rank your website higher on the first page of Google search results. Ranking high with the search engines is what brings the traffic to your website, and if your website shows up in the first results for the keywords people are searching for, this is good for business!

Traffic means money!

So let's go ahead and briefly talk about the SEO concept. SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, and that's what gets you the high ranks on Google and other search engines. This kind of optimization depends on various aspects, and we will discuss some of them, so that you can understand what they mean and how you can make them work for you.

If I were asked which is the most important factor to improve your Google Rankings, I would definitely say BACKLINKING.

But what exactly is backlinking?

First up, think about some restless machines always scrutinizing the information on every website in existence.

This is exactly what the search engines are designed to do. They look at the content of websites and rank them by relevance of that content to the website's keywords. But there's much more than just the information you have on your website's pages. For every subject you can imagine, including the one your website is about, there could be thousands or millions of other sites.

One other sign that a website relevant to the subject it deals with is if it's referenced externally via links. Out of two sites on the same topic, the one that is referenced through more links over the internet will be considered more helpful for the users looking for info on that topic.

These are called, incoming links, inbound links or backlinks and they refer people from other sites to yours. The more quality your website has, the more backlinks you are supposed to get.

Google thinks of a link coming from some other website to your website as a vote and this is why backlinking plays a huge role on the way Google sets their rankings.

Think about Wikipedia and how they always show up within the first results for almost any search. Why do you think that is? 75,000,000 domain backlinks!!! (I know it is insane, but it's TRUE!)

So now you know the importance of backlinks, but it is more important to know HOW to get them for your own website.

There are several ways to do that and the most common are:

- reciprocal links - links between two websites to ensure mutual traffic
- forum links - using signature links on forums
- commenting on blogs - go to high ranked blogs and add a link to your comment
- links from other pages, such as video sharing websites, article directories etc.

Naturally, the more such backlinks your site has,the higher it will be ranked on search engines. But pay attention, this doesn't mean you should buy some automatic tool and just get 1000 backlinks per day. Bulding up backlinks at an unnaturally high rate or speed is suspect and Google has a very low tolerance of spam, going to such lengths as penalizing or even banning websites!

George Tiganus is an expert author providing valuable information on how to increase Google Ranking for any website. His MLM Training Secrets rise the successful building of an online business to new standards of efficiency.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=George_Tiganus

Google Page Rank Explained

Page Rank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google to compute the relative importance of a particular webpage on the internet and assign it a numeric value from 0 (least important) to 10 (most important). This value is calculated through an iterative analysis of the backlinks to the webpage. If webpage A links to webpage B then webpage B would receive 1 "vote" towards their page rank.

Fact: Page Rank is calculated on a webpage by webpage basis not on a website by website basis

The importance of the webpage casting a vote and the total number of outgoing links on the webpage casting a vote are the primary factors which determine how much "voting share " this webpage will transfer to each of the outgoing links on them. Google calculates a webpage's page rank by adding up all of the "voting shares " for that webpage through an iterative calculation.

Page Rank is one of the factors Google utilizes to help determine their Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERP's). It should be noted that this algorithm is only one part of their overall ranking scheme and not necessarily the most important one as many website's would have you believe. The general internet user has no idea about the concept of page rank and are unable to tell what a particular page's PR is unless they have the Google Toolbar installed (or use an online page rank checker). Since page rank is part of Google's search ranking algorithm an understanding of the concept is still important for any webmaster concerned with getting traffic to their site.

Fact: Not all links pointing to a webpage are counted as votes for that webpage

As soon as Google introduced the concept of page rank unsavory webmasters developed ways to manipulate the rankings. These webmasters began creating web pages with the sole purpose of increasing the amount of incoming links pointing to their website.

Common Black Hat SEO Techniques:

• Link Farms - pages containing long lists of unrelated links set up for the sole purpose of manipulating search engine rankings and page rank
• Doorway Pages - orphaned webpages either on the same website or distributed throughout the internet stuffed with keywords containing links to the offender's site. Used to artificially inflate the back link count for a website.
• Free For All Links Pages - a type of link farm where, as the name implies, anyone is free to post their link. Once a valuable way to spread the word about your website, abuse through auto submissions has rendered these sites worthless and are now viewed as search engine SPAM.
• Automated or Hosted Link Exchanges - sites that offer to provide "hundreds" of back links to your site instantly. Generally you will have to install some html code on your website to display their directory and in return anyone else who has this code installed on their website will be displaying your link. This is a case where "if it sounds too good to be true it is". The search engine's are wise to this technique and watch for unnatural "spikes" in the number of backlinks pointing to a website. In actuality it is possible to inflate your page rank with this technique but if the search engine's wise up to your practices (and they always do eventually) you risk being dropped from their index or black holed in their rankings.

How is Page Rank Calculated?

When Google introduced the concept of page rank they published the algorithm they were going to use to calculate it. The formula in it's current form is known only to the engineers at Google but it is fair to say it closely resembles the following formula.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

While at first glance this equation can seem daunting, in actuality the concept is not that hard to understand. Let's take a minute to break down the formula and see what conclusions can be drawn.

PR(t1)...PR(tn) - the page rank (PR) of each page from page t1 to tn. (each value of t represents 1 link to webpage A)

C(t1)...C(tn) - the number of outgoing links (C) on each page from page t1 to tn

d - damping factor

Quoting from the original Google Page Rank white paper:

The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85.

Knowing what these parameters mean and knowing the value of the damping factor we can simplify the formula from above:

PR(A) = 0.15 + 0.85*(A "share" of the PR of every webpage linking to page A)

The "share" each webpage passes to webpage A can be computed by dividing the Page Rank of the webpage linking to page A by the number of outgoing links on that page. Each outgoing link on that page would receive an equal voting share from the total available page rank of the page containing the outgoing link. The total available page rank each webpage has available to transfer to outgoing links is a little less than the total page rank of that page (PR of page * 0.85) which can be easily derived when the damping factor is known.Implications

Having a basic understanding of the algorithm we can now draw a few conclusions about page rank and it's implications to your website. For instance, it is very possible to have a link on web page X that has a high page rank transferring less page rank voting shares to your website than a link on web page Y with a lower page rank.

How is this possible?
Let's analyze an example:

Page X - page rank 4, outgoing links 10

Page Y - page rank 8, outgoing links 100

Page X would transfer 0.85(4/10) = 0.34 page rank voting shares to each outgoing link

Page Y would transfer 0.85(8/100) = 0.068 page rank voting shares to each outgoing link

Even though Page X has a much lower page rank value, due to the fact that the number of outgoing links on Page X is so much smaller than on Page Y it actually transfers more page rank voting shares to each outgoing link than Page Y .

Pages with no links back to them would still have a modest page rank value of 0.15 derived from the (1-d) portion of the equation. It is important to note that while this value holds true according to the equation, only Google engineers are privy to the knowledge of whether actual page rank voting share is transferred in this scenario. Google could easily say that pages with no incoming links transfer a page rank voting share of 0 with a click of a mouse and no one would know for sure except them.

Fact: The Google Toolbar displays Page Rank as a base 10 log scale that is not the "actual" result of the Page Rank calculation

The average page rank of all pages in the index is 1. It is possible to have an "actual" page rank value in the millions or much smaller than 1 using the page rank formula but the Google toolbar only displays integers from 0 - 10 on it's pr meter. Only Google knows how the scale is split up and where the basepoints for each level are. For example, it may take an actual page rank of 10,000 using the formula above to achieve a page rank of 4/10 on the toolbar scale.

Page Rank in Complex Networks

The example above does not actually duplicate a real world example since it is only computing the page rank "voting share" of the ffa page in an idealized situation where the page rank of the page is already known. In complex networks with links in and links out of webpages the actual page rank for a webpage cannot be known due to the interdependencies each web page has on one another to calculate their page rank.

Think of it as a "chicken and the egg" situation. The problem can be solved by taking a best initial guess for the page rank value of each webpage in the network and plugging it into the page rank formula. The results of these calculations are then used to calculate the next incremental page rank values for the webpages in the network. This calculation is repeated over and over again until the page rank value approaches a limit. This limit is then the actual page rank for that page. In a complex network like the internet finding the page rank for all webpages can take millions of iterations.

Click here [http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank] for more detailed examples and an online page rank calculator

It is also worth noting that when a webpage transfers page rank voting shares to another webpage the page rank of the contributing page is not reduced in any way. There is no actual page rank transfer, only a weighted "vote" is passed to the outgoing links.

Links on webpages with a high page rank and little or no other outgoing links on them but yours will provide the best opportunities to improve your page rank (if that is your goal and it shouldn't be, link for traffic not pr). Make sure to work on your site content and design before approaching other webmasters for links. The bottom line is you need to have a site worth linking to in order to get people to link to it.

Resources

Google Page Rank Whitepaper

Complex Page Rank Examples including Calculations [http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank]

Michael Lawrence is a University of Waterloo Engineering Graduate. Currently his projects include the Cobrasurf SEO Directory [http://www.cobrsasurf.org] and SEO Web Guide [http://www.seowebguide.com/]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michael_Lawrence

Blog Backlinks - How to Improve PageRank With Google For Your Online Business

Getting Google backlinks to your site is more important for your page rank than your outgoing links. You want high ranking sites to link to your page or site for Google SEO to sit up and take notice.

So how do you get them?

First... let's define "Backlinks" or "Incoming links."

Definition: Direct links to your websites through other sites. This is called Off-page SEO, or links from other websites back to yours to gain popularity with search engines.

Getting backlinks from sites that have high readership or ranking, are the sites you want to link to your site or pages.

Here are a few simple methods of how to get backlinks that are high in quality and will help to improve your page rank.

EzineArticles: EzineArticles get thousands of viewers a day visiting their site. They have extremely high Google page rank.

Write an article and have a link that points back to a page on your blog site. When a reader clicks the anchor text in your signature area, it then becomes a quality link coming from EzineArticles. This strategy is excellent for a new blog.

Squidoo: Build a simple Squidoo Lens and have it link to a page on your blog that contains similar information. Squidoo is an authority site that will help you improve your page rank backlinks.

HubPages: HubPages is much like EzineArticles. The incoming links to your blog will be high quality links. Tip: Use only original content in HubPages. You cannot re-purpose content from other sites or sources.

YouTube: Ahhh! One of my favorites! I have 28 videos that point to pages on a blog that I have in another niche. Videos have served me well in sending me high quality backlinks from other sites who have used one of my videos on their site.

Get busy and produce a video that you can point back to your site. Point an anchor text link in your description box back to your blog. When folks click on it, you will get a superior incoming link from YouTube.

Good luck in your efforts for getting solid page rank backlinks to your blog. Remember to use strategies that will encourage strong Google backlinks. You will find additional Internet marketing secrets by visiting Online Marketing | There you will find marketing and promotional strategies revealed that will super charge your Online Business. "There Are Big Profits In Knowledge."

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Kathryn_Griffiths