What is Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank: -

Archive for July, 2008

What is Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank: -

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

When you get past the beginning level of SEO ( Read -Introduction to SEO techniques ) , you’ll begin hearing about a lot of terms that are unfamiliar to you. Among these are Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank. These are topics of concern for web masters who want to ensure that their sites are doing good in search engine rankings. While both Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank are important in SEO and measure much of the same thing the popularity of a website they are also different in some ways. These differences make it important to understand the very basics of both Google Page Rank and Alexa Rank, which will be covered in this lesson.

What is Google Page Rank?
Google Page Rank, as the Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin put it, is a tool developed to rank websites that are listed in the Google search engine. The page rank is given in a scale of 0-10. 0 is the lowest possible score for a site, while 10 is the highest. The higher the page ranking of your site, the greater the amount of traffic it receives.

Now you know what the Google Page Rank is. But how, exactly, is it determined? Well, Google uses a really complicated mathematical formula to determine the ranking of a page. We could literally spend this entire lesson going over this formula, which really would be a waste of time. Instead, we’ll just talk about it in a non-in depth, but still useful way.

When Google is ranking a web site, there are several factors involved. The first is the overall layout of the site and how “complete” it is. Google dislikes incomplete site maps being sent to the search engine, which is why you should only submit the site map when the site is actually finished. The second major factor is the usage of keywords. Google likes a site with good usage of keywords. They like a keyword density of 3-5%. Another major factor is that of external links. Google likes it when your site is getting linked to by other sites. That way Google can find your site more often. The last major factor is how updated the site is. Google hates outdated sites, so make sure yours is updated often. All of these factors make up the basis of the Google Page Rank.

You can determine your Google Page Rank, Alexa Page Rank, inbound links, indexed pages, important directories and site listing, press and media mentions and another 30 ranking parameters for your website using the last version of Website Popularity SEO ranking software.

What is the Alexa Rank? -

The Alexa Rank is much like the Google Rank, with one main difference: it is exclusively based on page views, number of users and three months of historical data. It is not based on SEO principles like the Google Page Rank is, although having a good SEO’d site will help the cause.

An Alexa Rank may range from 1 to a billion, depending on the number of web sites. Every web site in the world is included in the Alexa Rank, so you’re up against all of them. The goal is to have a high ranking (generally considered to be in the 1-1,000,000 range). Presently, the highest ranked site in the Alexa Rank is Yahoo.com, although Google.com poses a threat to this. You can find out your Alexa Page Rank by going to Alexa.com directly or checking using the Website Popularity.
How can I improve my Google Page Rank?

The good thing about the Google Page Rank is that it can be improved pretty easily. Follow these suggestions to improve yours:
1. Create a site that is search engine optimized. Your site should be full of quality content that doesn’t fall short in terms of keywords and keyword density. Strive for a keyword density of 3-5% and make sure that all keywords and content are relative to your site’s purpose.
2. Use META and title tags correctly. One of the biggest factors in search engine optimizing a site is that of the META and title tags. When using these, you should make sure that the title tag is accurate and that the META tag describes your site well. For tips on META and title tags, check out Lesson 4: Title and META tag creation
3. Submit all pages to the Google site map. Do so only when the site is completed.
4. Build targeted traffic to your website. How can I improve my Alexa Rank?

To improve the Alexa Rank, all you need to do is improve your traffic to your site. Following the tips in the above section and in the next lessons should help you to increase traffic, which will, in turn, increase your Alexa Rank. There are tools out there which claim to improve the Alexa Rank, however, these are usually not very effective and may do more harm than good to your site’s ranking. Do not go for submission to 300,000 search engines, this is the worst thing you can do.

Tags: check my Alexa rank, check my google page rank, check your google page rank, Google page rank check, what is Alexa rank, What is Google page rank
Posted in Seach Engine Optimisation, Web Miscellaneous | Comments Off

Introduction to Search engine optimisation techniques: -

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization. If you’re a web master, you’ve probably heard this phrase mentioned often. If you’re someone who has been doing web master work for years, you might not be very familiar with what search engine optimization (SEO) is. That’s OK, as it’s not something that many people have learned about. While it’s not as common knowledge as it should be, SEO isn’t a very difficult subject to learn thoroughly enough. In fact, learning the techniques of SEO can actually be very easy. We’ll teach you all about SEO in this lesson ( Just kidding, we will need more lessons for this job ).

What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization. What does this mean? Well, it essentially means you are creating a site that is search engine friendly. Search engines, as you probably know, are responsible for a lot of your web site’s traffic. The more search engine friendly a site is, the greater the chance people using a search engine will find the site. Basically, by making your site SEO, you are increasing your traffic. That’s why SEO is a very important part of current web master work. Here are some essential SEO tips that every web site should follow. Design your web site by following these tips and I guarantee that visitors will have a great first impression of your site.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques -
Now that you know what SEO is, you’ll want to know how to apply it to your web site so that you, too, can reap the benefits. There are several SEO techniques to learn, and we’ll cover three very important ones that you can apply immediately to your site.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #1: Keywords and Key phrases-

The most basic SEO technique is that of the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords are basically words that a search engine spider (basically a program which scans web sites and reports its findings back to the search engine database) is trained to find. If these words are found, the site is more likely to catch the attention of the spider and get listed. Key phrases are just like keywords, except they are basically two or more words strung together. For instance, a common key phrase might be “cool web sites”. Using such a key phrase or key word enough can really help a site to become SEO friendly. Search Engine Optimization

Technique #2: Correct Titles

If you look at the top left of your web browser, you’ll notice a piece of text that states what site you are on and perhaps also gives a brief description of what the site is. This piece of text is known as the “Title” of a web page. The title is one of the first things a search engine spider will notice when visiting a site. Thus, it is important to make sure your web site has a meaningful title. The title should not include excessive amounts of keywords, and whatever keywords you do use should be relevant to the site at hand. Spiders have been trained to spot sites with excessive amounts of keywords and they will ignore such sites. So don’t ever overuse keywords. If you have a site dedicated to PRS electric guitars, an appropriate SEO title might be something like “PRS Electric Guitars.com â€“ Your source for PRS guitars”.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #3: Keyword Density-

There is such a thing as overusing keywords, and it can be worse than using no keywords at all in terms of getting ranked highly on a search engine. Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the number of total words in a page. So if you have 500 total words and 10 keywords, you’d have 2% keyword density. An appropriate keyword density is anywhere between 2% and 7%.Anything more than this is considered keyword stuffing; anything less than this is considered too little to make an impact.

How to write content for my website?

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Going beyond the obvious — good grammar, spelling and choosing a clean, clear typeface — there are many things that you can do to write quality content for your website.

Content is king of all kings they say. This has never been so true as it is when you are talking about web content. There is so much information available on the web these days that people expect information to be unique, timely and relevant. The content needs to be fast loading, clean and easy to read, easy to navigate and especially easy for the search engines to index.

1) Make your content interesting.
Don’t just provide dry information and facts. Make it lively and entertaining whenever possible. Sell yourself, your services or your product. Use humor and make yourself likable. Put yourself into your client’s shoes and try to write your content as if you were trying to convince yourself to buy, sign-up, or request your own service. What would make you buy your product?

2) Write about things and provide information that you know well.
Do it quickly and efficiently so you get your message across fast but also make quality use of the time someone is spending reading your site. If you try to cover a large topic in a mediocre or unconvincing way, people will probably not bookmark and return or even worse they many not even finish reading and move on.

3) keep your content short and sweet when possible.
The first paragraph of your article is critical. If it’s dull, boring and lifeless, your reader will surely move on. You must keep their interest right from the start and drive them to pick up the phone or pull out their credit card. On the web people like to get information fast and it better be good. Don’t drone on for pages trying to sell and convince people. Give it to them straight and to the point and then if you feel that it might be beneficial to expand on your topic then do so. But never drag out a sales pitch. Allow your visitors to get the information they need and then if they want more you can always provide it.

4) Make your content load fast.
There is nothing more irritating than a site that loads slow. There are many reasons for this and the reasons can sometimes be out of your hands like the users connection speed, network congestion, slow host server, etc. But overall you and your web developer have control over your content.

5) Provide content that is broken up into short paragraphs and short pages.
People are much more able to digest content faster if the information is given to them in short bursts instead of long clumps of text.

6) Do not use images to replace text.
They take longer to load, they really don’t look much better, blind people can’t read it and that text will no longer be searchable by the search engines.

7) Only underline links and make sure you have actual links underlined
if the link is included in a paragraph of text. If you underline text to emphasize something but it is not an actual link, your readers will almost certainly be confused. The same goes for links that are not underlined. People may miss out on valuable information because they have no idea that the text leads to something more detailed or interesting.

8) Structure your text.
Make use of bold headings, short paragraphs, bullet lists and tables if the information requires it. To better organize your thoughts, divide your article into sub-headings. Sub-headings make things easier to digest. Instead of tackling the entire article at once, try writing one paragraph at a time.

9) Use words in your content that people will search for.
Search engines consider headings, page titles, bold and linked text to be more important and relevant and the precise wording of these sections of your content are extremely important.

10) Create a lot of links and use relevant keyword phrases as the link text.
Ask other sites with similar content to link to your site and most important, tell them the text to use in the link.

11) Make good use of white space and allow your content to breathe
Don’t allow text to butt up against graphic elements on your site or photographs, etc. Don’t place too much emphasis on your navigation elements if content is important to your site. Allow users to easily read your message in a clean, uncluttered and — in the case of blinking text — non-irritating environment.

12) Write your own content.
Use only content (pictures, text, videos …) made by you or with explicit permission, everything else probably infringes someone’s copyright.

Archive for July, 2008