Improve Your Search Rankings

One of the most important, but also most mysterious aspects of web design is SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization helps your site rank higher in the search results pages which translates to more visitors. This article is a breakdown of steps for the beginner and intermediate webmasters that will make a big difference in your search rankings.

Terminology

Before we delve deeper, its important that everyone starts on the same page; there are many confusing acronyms and abbreviations that are mentioned when discussing Search Engine Optimization.

Background

In Google, your site's SERP position for a certain keyword depends on your PageRank and other factors relating directly to the keyword itself. Not every site that has a high PageRank ranks highly for every keyword, because a high PageRank site may have nothing to do with a particular keyword. However, it's a sure bet that the top results in the SERPs for most popular search terms also have a high PageRank. Get it? So Search Engine Optimization of your site really has two distinct paths - the overall popularity and quality of your site, and the relevance to your target keywords.

Targeting Keywords

When designing your site, think of a few keywords that accurately summarize the whole site. For my site, for example, you could use "Web Development" and "PHP Scripts." Likely these would work well as keywords, but you could also be more detailed and use "Web Development Resources" and "Free PHP Scripts." Don't use just "PHP" and "Web" though, because these are too general and there will just be too much competition. across the web. Also, for each distinct page of the website, we may want to choose a keyword as well - something that really accurately describes a particular page. For this page, we could use "Simple SEO Workshop."

Now that you have selected your keywords, the goal of our optimizations is to make the search engines see these keywords and associate your site or a particular page with a search for that term. To do this, you often may have to change your content around, and even write in a less than elegant way.

Here are some tips for keyword optimization:

Improving Overall PageRank

After optimizing your site for keywords, you now need to start improving your site's overall quality and popularity. The funny thing about PageRank, which goes back to the original Stanford thesis written by the creators of Google, is that it's all a popularity contest. Google sees an external link to your site as a "vote" for your site, increasing your PageRank. The more external sites linking to your site, the more votes you get, and the higher PageRank you get.

Some interesting notes and exceptions on this broad description:

• Anchor text of backlinks is very important. You want links on other sites to closely match the keywords you are trying to target, so the search engines believe that this term is a good description of your site. Do a web search on "Google bomb" for a funny anecdote relating to this phenomenon.
• One-way links are better than reciprocal links. If you link back to the site that links to you, you may not get as much credit to your PageRank as you would if it was a one-way link.
• PageRank rubs off on linked sites. If sites that themselves have a high PageRank link to you versus a few low PageRank sites, you be awarded with a higher resulting PageRank by Google. In other words, link quality is an important factor to Google.
• Backlinks on sites with many outward links have less effect. If you are in a list of 100 links on a site, you are going to get less resulting PageRank than if the site only had a few links.

You don't really have to know what your PageRank is to effectively understand how to use PageRank to your advantage. The single best way of increasing your PageRank is to have other sites link to you. It's that easy.

Please Link to Me

Emailing webmasters is one way of gaining links, but often is fruitless. Keep an eye out for sites that let you submit content, such as a blog, where you can put a link to your site and benefit. The best kind of links are the permanent, non-blog kind of links and these are hard to come by. Having good content is the best way to get random static links.

Improving Site Quality

There are other less obvious SEO ways of improving site quality that are "off the page." It has been said that Google will even research how long your have registered your domain for when assessing PageRank. The longer the registration, the more likely that your site is "legit" and worthy of a higher PageRank. Other sources claim that spelling and grammar errors can hurt a site's rankings. Properly created html and css tags may also affect PageRank. Consider running your site through the W3C Validator to check for properly coded html.

Waiting for Results

Sadly it will take some time for these methods produce results. Google re-indexes pages sporadically, so there is no real way of telling how often Google will check your site for updated content. Most sources will say that the MSN search engine is actually the most active at checking sites for changes. Also, backlinks are not always continually updated in the Google system. Instead, they are exported in batches. Perhaps the most frustrating of all is that Google only updates the PageRank display on the toolbar every three months, so it is hard to determine what has had effect or not. Real PageRank is supposedly updated continuously, even if the toolbar doesn't show it. Over the last few years, Google has taken longer and longer between toolbar PageRank updates. For more information on Google's confusing schedule, checkout http://www.seologs.com/google-updates.html.