Increase Your Google Page Ranking

Google is considered the God of the Internet world. The purpose of Google is to help people find what they are looking for based on their key search terms. Search engine traffic is the best type of traffic you can have.The only way to be seen by potential customers is to reach page one of the Google search.

Let's face it... no one really looks beyond the first page of the listings. If your site isn't listed on the coveted first page... you are leaving a lot of potential revenue on the table for your competitors to snatch up. Let's take a look at how you can increase your page rank to increase traffic to your website.

Increasing your page rank in the search engines begins with proper onpage seo optimization. It's not as hard as you think to optimize your site properly to attract search engine attention. Just follow these strategies:

Keywords: Keyword research is a must. Before you just go and load your site full of the highest traffic keywords, you should do some research first. If you are competing in a high profile niche like 'internet marketing' you should look more to the keywords that have a little less search results but are highly relevant to your site.

When including keywords in your meta tags, do not include more than 15 of the keywords that you wish to rank for.

Title Optimization: Since keywords are important, use THE keyword you want to rank for on the particular page you are optimizing and use it in your title tag.

Meta Tags: Since search engine spiders crawl your meta tags, you will need to optimize them as well. Use your keyword in your website's description, tags, and headings.

Image ALT Tags: Don't neglect your images. Give your images keyword rich titles. Use keywords that are related to your page's content.

Internal Linking: Link to the best page(s) on your site to give them more weight. Link to other relevant, high traffic pages within your site.

Highly Optimized Content: Optimize the content of each page on your site for the keyword you are trying to rank for. Doing this gives more weight to your keyword. Update your content regularly by adding more unique content on a daily basis.

Create a Sitemap: Creating a sitemap makes it easier for search engine spiders to crawl and properly index your site and its content. You will need to create 2 versions for your site. Google prefers a XML based sitemap while Yahoo wants a text based sitemap.

Tackling onpage optimization first will make it much easier to increase your overall page ranking on all major search engines, including Google.

Selecting the right keywords for your website is the foundation of your overall success. If you at a loss for how to come up with the best keywords, fear not, I'm going to show you my list of the favorite places to compile them.

1. Google Suggest: Key in the keyword that you are considering as one of your site's main keywords. When Google performs the search based on this keyword, it will not only tell you how many people are searching for this keyword on a monthly basis, it will also suggest other keywords and keyword phrases that are relevant to your keyword.

2. Google Trends: Choosing Your Keywords is one thing but knowing how popular they are is something else. Find out how popular your keywords are for the last 30 days, the last few months, or even over the last year.

3. Google Traffic Estimator: I have been surprised on more than one occassion to find out that the popluar keywords I chose didn't even rank in the traffic estimator. The traffic estimator feature allows you to put in your list of keywords, target them by region and language and then it provides statistics on how many clicks per day you could expect from each keyword.

Google traffic estimator could end up being the deciding factor for you when deciding which keywords to target on your website.The key to examining your site's keywords is to do a comparison between the broad search and the exact search for each.

Let's say that I wanted to use the keyword 'website traffic'. I would key it into the traffic estimator without brackets first (for a broad search) and with sqaure brackets for exact phrase matches. It would turn up the following information for me:

website traffic could expect to receive 150-190 clicks per day

[website traffic] could expect only 20-26 clicks per day

What's the difference? A broad search will only give the results of all searches that contain those keywords somewhere in the search phrase whereas an exact phrase match will show me how many clicks I could receive based on that exact term. The exact phrase match is more targeted and will help attract traffic that is looking for exactly what you have to offer. Targeted traffic and keywords are by far better than just generalized keywords.

Take a few minutes to re-examine your site's main keyword using these three tools. Are they stil ranking high? When you complete all of the necessary on-site and off-site tweaks to help please google, your search engine ranking will begin to grow as well as your traffic.Sometimes just one simple change to your site or its keywords can make all the difference in where your site is ranking.

If you can think of anything that I may have overlooked, feel free to add to the list in the comments :)

The easiest way to increase your ranking to reach the coveted page one of the Google rank is to make Google fall in love with your site. You can accomplish this by following these easy to apply steps:

1. Provide Unique, Fresh Content: I know you've heard it before a million times but this is one of the biggest factors. Not only must you provide unique content, but it must be updated frequently.

When people perform searches in Google they are looking for one thing- answers to their most pressing problems. Whether it be where to find a quality apartment or how to reach page one in Google, they simply want answers to their questions and they want them now.

Make sure your content is not only original but is also informative. Make your site an even mixture of regular length articles (about 500 words) and those that are considered "evergreen". Evergreen articles are longer in length (between 1,000 and 1,500 words) and keep readers on your site longer.

2. Target Your Content: There is nothing worse than arriving at a site from the search engines only to find out that the site's content isn't even relevant to what you were looking for!

Keep your site's content targeted at your customers and your main keywords while answering their unanswered questions. This of course requires a little research on your part to find out what your potential customers are searching for.

3. Clean up Your Meta Tags: Google puts a lot of weight into meta tag relevance. Make sure your meta tags accurately describe your site's content. Don't just stuff the most popular keywords into your tags hoping for a flood of traffic. Limit your keywords to around 10-15 of your content's strongest keywords.

4. Clean Up Your Image Tags: Whether you are aware of it or not, Google does take your images into consideration when spidering a page. When they come across a site that includes images and the images are labelled simply as "box2.gif" or "header1.jpg" they are overlooked.

Take the time to utilize your keywords in your images and alt tags as well. If you have a box shot of your product don't waste your time just labelling it "box". Let's say that the box shot was for a seo software named "SEO Spider Success". Go ahead and give the image the proper name and then use your main keyword in the alt tag like: "seo software image" or something to that effect. Then Google will give it more consideration because it contains your main keyword.

5. Target Your Title Tag: The absolute worst thing you could do is use your site's name in the title tag. The best way to optimize your title tag is to use your main keyword(s). Limit it to 8-10 words max and use 1-2 keyword phrases.What keyword(s) or keyword phrases are you trying to target? What keyword(s) do you want your site to come up under in a Google search? Use those keywords carefully in your site's title.

6. Have Quality Backlinks To Your Site: It has been said that 90% of your page rank is determined by your backlinks! But where your backlinks come from is more important than how many you have floating around.

Make it your goal to get a minimum of 35 relevant backlinks to your site. The sites you choose to receive backlinks from must be relevant to your niche or market and they must be sites that have already been indexed by Google.

As I discussed in an earlier hub, the easiest way to get quality backlinks and increase your page rank is to get those links from authority sites.... like hub pages:) Google shows preference to authority sites and backlinks from them.

 The more pages a site has the more page rank it will have but they only count if google knows about them. This is where your sitemap and website submissions come in.

Adding pages to your site is an excellent way to increase your site's total page rank since each new page adds an average of 1 to the total. When a new page has been added, its new page rank can be channeled to other important pages on your site.

When you add a new page to your site, link that new page to the important pages on your site that have a steady traffic flow. The page that receives the inbound link makes the biggest gain in your overall efforts.

Once you are done with the internal linking, create backlinks from high traffic, high PR authority sites to increase their overall relevance and authority.