How To Boost Your Google Page Ranking

Every internet based business dreams of racing to the top of Google. The search engine is so revered around the globe that many people now think if you’re not on Google, you might as well not bother being on the internet.

This point of view does of course undermine the importance of the other leading search engines like Yahoo, MSN and Ask! It’s also not a belief that’s universally held.

But if you do want to improve your Page Ranking on the search giant (and let’s face it, who doesn’t!) there are a few things you can do that Google likes.

1) Are you plugged in: If you’ve only recently set up your website make sure you’re registered on Google before you do anything else! It only takes a moment and is your opportunity to really promote what your site’s about.

2) Make sure your site’s in the best format: Google uses spiders or ‘googlebots’ to ‘crawl’ your site’s content and rank it in terms of importance. But it can only detect the site’s content if it’s properly written in the code. Google won’t pick up the text used in an image for example. So be careful about how much your site relies on images or items you’ve scanned in.

3) Count your key-words: Key-words are the words most applicable to your site. So in the case of our site the most relevant words are ‘Arachnid’, ‘Web’ and ‘Hosting’. Repeating those 3 words again and again wouldn’t do us much good. According to the experts the optimum key-word level is 3% to 7% of your total text content.

4) Check your internal links work: The ‘spiders’ follow the same links on your site that a user would. So if a link on your menu bar doesn’t work or an internal text link’s down, then the spider will hit the same dead end a user would. In Google’s view, not having the link at all is better than having one that leads to an error page.

5) Change your site content regularly: Remember that Page Ranking is based on how important your site is considered. By updating, editing and adding to your site content regularly Google associates the activity with something interesting. Think of the BBC News site, which is constantly updated and holds a Page Ranking of 9/10, which is on a par with google.co.uk.

6) Generate external links back to your site: But make sure they’re relevant. If you think you can shortcut the system by submitting your site to 10,000 search engines in one go, you’re sadly mistaken. Google can see what you’ve done and won’t like it. Your best bet is to work at getting a fewer number of links from sites similar or related to your own.

7) Pay your way to the top: At the end of the day Google is a business so if you want them to put you at the top, the surest way is by paying. The search engine’s AdWords programme means you can choose specific search words or phrases tailored to your site. So when someone types those words into Google your listing should come up on the right hand side of the front page. The benefits of the system are you get charged on a per click basis, users who click through are generally looking for your business services and you can set a limit on what you spend per day.

Trying to dupe Google into pushing your site higher is a very risky business. The old tricks that used to get sites to the top are well known now. And new tricks can result in your site being kicked off Google completely. BMW became a victim of this terrifying fate recently when Google thought the site’s webmasters were trying to manipulate search results in their favour.

In conclusion, it’s also worth mentioning that Google successfully defended its right to alter a site’s Page Ranking based on its own opinion. So although the above tips are tried and tested methods that can help improve your site’s status, when it comes to search results we’re all ultimately at the mercy of the internet giant. In other words, our Page Rankings are ‘there, but for the grace of Google.’

Note: The above is intended to be used as a very basic guide. If pushing your ranking right to the top of internet search engines (Search Engine Optimisation) is of crucial importance to your business, our advice is to source specialist help. But whatever you do, we always recommend you play it safe.

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