complete beginners guide to google ranking and seo
February 25th, 2008
the more complex aspects of google ranking are covered pretty in depth here but this tutorial is intended to cover the complete basics for those of you launching your first website.
google used to give a timeframe for new sites appearing, but now no longer do this. they state
Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear” - however it is my experience that most sites appear with 2 weeks to a month of being launched.
adding your url(s) to http://www.google.com/addurl/ helps speed it up - i do this with all new sites i put online.
the main factors in how high up the results page you show are:
the url/name/main search words of your site.
eg: if you sell dresses and your site is called ‘dresses.co.uk‘ it will probably take a lot of work to make you rank well. however if your site is called ‘biscuitsintheshapeofbullfrogs
the popularity of your site
this is a bit chicken and egg with your google ranking itself, but the more popular your site the higher it will rank - so if you did own ‘dresses.co.uk‘ but were getting more traffic than any other site about dresses you would get a good listing. for this reason you may find that even if your site is doing pretty well a google search might still place links to it from sites such as wikipedia, myspace or youtube above it because of the amount of traffic they get. there are several ways to check the traffic your site is getting including hit counters, google stats and stats from your hosting provider. if you want more information on these please email me for the various services i can help you set up.
links
links both in and out help your site on google. the more places linking to you, the more popular google sees your site as being. also the popularity of the site linking to you will add weight to the link. so for example a link from amazon.com will carry more weight than a link from a small personal blog.
many sites, particularly blogs will be happy to link you if you link them, though it is wise to stick to sites that have at least a passing relevance to the content of your own site.
another simple way to increase links in is to add your url as your signature whenever you post on blogs, forums or social networking sites. this also acts as free publicity and if you are posting on relevant sites may increase traffic too..
content and reqularity of update
some content is harder than other for google to digest, in particular flash, also the more content and more often updated the more google likes you.
it is also advisable for the site to be w3c compliant.
finally it is down to google! there are lots of other seo tricks that can be performed (indeed there are people whose sole job it is to optimise sites for search engines) however please be wary of anything that is designed to trick google or that costs you a lot of money, they rarely work and in the case of the former may even get your site blacklisted from google.
the best analogy i have for google is that it used to be like finding a hairdresser in your local yellow pages but now it’s like trying to see a market stall in soho from outer-space! there are just so many sites online now that you have to shout quite loud to be seen!: