Improving your Google Page Rank

From Eric Buckley at scgdomains.com

It is a known fact that Google is one of the most important search engines on the Internet. To have your site displayed at the top of the search results, you need to improve your link popularity and you need to understand how Google measures the link popularity of your web site.

What makes a good Google Page Ranking?

Link popularity is the first aspect reviewed by the Google algorithm and is determined by the number of web sitesthat are linking to your web site. Search engines use the number of links to your web site as a measure of how important your web site is. The more links you have from other sites, the more important your web site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

But this is not the only factor used to calculate your web site’s link popularity. Your web site is also examined against the relevance of the links your web site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has links from 4,000 other web sites, but those web sites have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm will take that into account, and the link popularity, or page rank score will not be very good.

This means that it is possible for a website with a relatively small number of relevant inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links.

You could try to build links to your web site by using link farms or FFA (Free For All) pages. Not only will this damage your search engine rankings, but your web site may get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Link farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are link directories. Search engines, such as Google, usually penalize web sites that have links coming from these sources.

So now we know that one factor that Google uses in their algorithm is the total number of sites linking to your web site. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, links from web sites that are relevant to the subject matter on your web sites rate higher than links that are not relevant.

Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a web site or page that text and content that relates to the text on your web site. The key terms or text that is relevant are considered keywords. For example, if your site is about weight loss, and another weight loss website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information or textual content (keywords) about weight loss is being discussed.

Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that helps to describe your web site. Anchor text is the text between the <a href=”"></a> tags. So if the link from another web site had the following link code <a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>WEIGHT LOSS</a> the link text is “WEIGHT LOSS”. If there was a link from the blog on another web site about WEIGHT LOSS to your web site using that anchor text, your score would be higher.

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword WEIGHT LOSS, Google considers that to be unusual. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to your topic, such as WEIGHT LOSS PLAN or DIET WEIGHT LOSS, etc.

It is not an easy task to increase the link popularity of your web site, but this bit of information should assist you in designing a site, and structuring your textual content to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site using relevant ANCHOR TEXT.

This is a repost of our blog entry where you can learn exactly how Google calculates their page ranking for your web site, at the SCG Blog for Improve your Google Page Rank.

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