Google & your website. how to rank up?

[Kumagoro]

I was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to get your site higher up in searches when it comes to google.

What criteria do you think they use and how much affect does it have?

So far i have found the most effective way is to just put the search words in plain text at the top of the website. As when you search it seems to look for words it finds in the first paragraph of a webpage.

If i were to use google and then enter words which makes my site appear then click on it will this help boost it up over a period of time?

if i put a lot of words in the search does it count towards my ranking for each individual word or the combination of others.

The site (my bros) is www.onlyforthehardcore.co.uk which is an oldskool rave site which will have lots of flyers and some tunes on (or will be eventually)

Also will posting the link on forums and other websites make much of a difference? from what i have found the few words at the top seems to work the best when it comes to smaller sites. any tips would be helpful.

[Theo]

There's probably more, but:

-meta keywords
-high traffic
-frequent updates
-large sums of money

all help to get you a higher rank, if I remember correctly.

[yamangman]

It's pretty much what you said Kumagoro, but it depends on what the browser is searching for. Some search criteria are more comman than others. Search for 'RIAT videos' for example, and a site of mine will appear at the top. It has that exact phrase at the top of the page in a H1 tag, it's not a common phrase, put these together and its likely to appear toward the top. Meta keywords have little use, indeed as you say posting the link on forums and the like should generate a degree of traffic and also boost your site. Just get a good description of the site in plain text on yuor front page containing key words and phrases, wait for traffcs to build and if its popular enough you should see an increase shortly.

As far as I am aware, google particularly likes heading tags and the first couple of paragraphs on each page.

You could check what click throughs you get from google and see what keywords users have used to find your site and expand upon that.

[Kumagoro]

Am i right in saying that google takes into account links from other sites to calculate the rank? so sticking it everywhere helps in that way?

right now the site is just a holding page (my bro is slow very slow). So I just wrote a few words describing the site.. basically words i think people will search for most without being to obvious and listing 100's. So now it turns up if i search for the words i wrote ok. However because i had mambo installed it had lots of pages so when i do search i dont get the top level I get /component/298/gr/424.php etc. im confused as to why this particular page come up highest in the search.

So i have been doing searches from my computer using those words and then clicking on the top level link when i find it... will this actually work (even a little) or am i just wasting time.

If it does work whats the best way to go about it?

say i use the search: Hardcore old skool rave flyers tunes

When i click on the site does it only count all the words together when calculating the rank or is it on individual words (sorry this is confusing but its gone 3am)

What i mean is because i used a particular word does it go up the rank for that particular word? so say someone else does a search but only using a couple of the words will me using all the words effect that? also if i search the words in a diff order will that make a diff? I know its only a low effect but surely some is better then non and when it gets to a certain position its more likely to stay there right?
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How does higher traffic help boost your ranking? do you just mean people clicking on the link form a google search (i.e what i have been doing myself) or something else i cant even imagine?

How does frequently updating the page work? it it just a case of producing more entries in the google database? how long do they keep them for before they delete them?


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Am I able to see the referals form google in my web stats supplied by the hosting company? (it uses Cpanel) from there i can see what search words they used? or is there another way?

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sorry to anyone who tries to reply to this... but im bloody knackered.

[joshwa]

i think you'll struggle to get a good rank on google if your site doesn't actually have anything on it yet.

having a well built site, with lots of pages, that are interesting, on lots of different subjects will help. also update regularly, but why delete stuff? put a fresh post up about something interesting, and then when people search, they'll be able to find that post... as far as i'm aware google don't delete stuff - they want to be the "oracle" of the internet knowing about all of it.

nedstat is one traffic monitor that lets you know where people come from whether a link or a google search, in case your hosting stats aren't very useful or easy to use.

have a look here: http://www.livingroom.org.au/searchengineoptimization/

[Kumagoro]

I did have lots of generic Mambo pages which created a lot of different entries in google. problem was they were long messy addresses so i want to be able to get the top level one to appear first. I think the problem is with mambo it sets all the titles the same rather then individually (or thats what i made it do)

Basically what im trying to do is work out what is most effective... which seems to be the Title and the first couple of lines in the web page.

I thought about telling the spiders to only index the main page but i get the feeling that it will make the ranking worse.

*** Really would like to know if what i wrote below is possible ***
Is there a way to tell it (spiders/robots) to only list certain pages rather then just the top level or all of them? can i make the robots only list sub domains? or ceratin pages if so how
***

I have gone through the searches and redirected the ones which appear high up to goto the top level.. the pages of which now dont exist. Will this somehow boost the rank or is it will it have no effect?

on msn it comes pretty much near the top using the main search words and within the first couple of pages with just a few so that has been working... clicking on the links has also boosted it up already on msn.

google though is a different story sometimes it shows the main domain and then if i do the same search its not there. To be honest i dont like google anymore its been naff for the last two years at least.. there seems to be no quality control now. but most people use it.

I know once my bro gets around to doing it things will work better, I just want to make sure the listings are appropriate.

Thanks josh for the site its very helpful and everyone else whos replied

[Agent]

Am i right in saying that google takes into account links from other sites to calculate the rank? so sticking it everywhere helps in that way?

Yes, big time
From what ive read, this is one of googles main ways of organising rankings. If it see's a site linked to from many other places, it will assume that its popular and raise its ranking.
Note : That is only what ive read on other sites, i cant prove if its correct or false, but ive read it in more than one place

[Kumagoro]

It said on a link from the site josh that google relies a lot on link popularity too.

What i dont understand is why then is the highest ranked link to my site such a cack one. The one in question was a phpshop component so it may have had links to other sites on it... do these count then? because no where else should have that link.... If it does matter then surely your links page could easily get a higher rank and linking to big websites would make a difference... Surely this isnt the case though.
Is there any link relavency in the calcultation... i mean links which are in some way similar to your own byt keyword etc or it doesnt matter?

could it be that that page gets linked to the most internally in some way? does that make a difference?

[joshwa]

maybe your index page wasn't listed due to the lack of content on it, whereas google linked to the other pages which do have content? just a guess - as i haven't seen the other pages.

do you use google toolbar? if so, I have noticed that the searches through google toolbar seem to be different than the one's done on google.com

also - if you installed the advanced version of google toolbar, you get to see the page rank of the web page you are currently on. www.apple.com has 10/10 for example.

[Kumagoro]

I see. Well ive been using google.co.uk and sometimes when it was there it has vanished, totally not in the 100 (oh yes i checked) Im finding the top level by using the show all links option at the last page. Then i find it. The thing is before there was a lot more on the front page only recently i have simplified it. Its just strange that that particular link became number one.

can anyone answer some of my convoluted questions? yeah i know its hard. I know there isnt a def answer as they hide how its done but someone must have some idea what they do and dont do.

[joshwa]

This is how i got a friend's site listed on google : I linked to his site on 5 of my websites (I have a number of sites all with different domains).

previously his site wasn't listed on google at all.

some of the things that are important to google: content (unique is best, or stuff you know is popular), text size (readability), number of links to the site. the more pages you have and the more content the more likely you'll get linked to and the more likely people will find your site when they search for you.

without a site in place though you really will struggle to get there. (for example - how will you get people to link to an empty site, and how will google searches find your site if there's no content)

You need to have content that matches with the title/heading of the page - not just a title.

[joshwa]

"PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."

http://www.google.com/technology/

[Kumagoro]

Heres how things are coming along.

OK after a few days of messing around my site is now up to page 2.
The site is called onlyforthehardcore.co.uk and i put the title as,
Only For the Hardcore - OldSkool Rave Flyers and Tunes. the text in the webpage
as something similar.

the search was hardcore old skool rave flyers tunes.... so its not surprising that it come up high but then again they are common words for these kinds of sites.

I still have a question though does
using these words in a search then selecting mine help its rank with each
of those words OR just as that phrase (im not using any " to make phrase searches though)

Like i said before the page which was coming up in searches was not the top level
but now after this and clicking on the top level one as much as i could has resulted
in it jumping from page 6 on show all site to page 2 on a straight search on a uk search... which is not bad going.

Also on the .com search it has jumped from 19 to 4.

So it seems to me even with all this link analysis it comes down to the title on the webpage this seems to me the most important thing to get a good rank initially.

Im going to keep doing the same search and see how much i can affect its page from doing that. Im not sure if redirecting links which no longer exist made any difference.

Anyway thanks for your help everyone it was useful.

[Mblaster]

Getting links to your webpage on popular sites helps your google ranking, therefore getting you higher up the list. Try putting keywords in bold also.

[Deni]

Hi, not allowed to put my url.

[IBM]

Certainly not, you young whippersnapper...and certainly not on an eight year old thread.