How to Optimize Your Site's Ranking

Making sure your web pages are included in the Google search index is one thing; working to ensure a high PageRank within those results is something else. The process of tweaking your website to achieve higher search results on Google and other search sites is called search engine optimization (SEO), and it's a major consideration for all big-time webmasters.

To increase your site's ranking in Google's search results, you have to increase your site's PageRank. There are a number of ways to do this, almost all of which involve manipulating the content and HTML code of your site. Read on to learn some of the most effective techniques.

Increase the Number of Links to Your Site

Probably the biggest impact you can have on your site's PageRank is to increase the number of sites that link to the pages on your site. As you learned back in Chapter 1, "Inside Google," the PageRank rating is based on a complex and proprietary algorithm, which is heavily weighted in favor of links to your site. The more sites that link to your siteand the higher the PageRank of those links sitedthe higher your site's PageRank will be.

To increase your PageRank, then, you want to get more higher-quality sites to link back to your site. And it's not enough for those sites to have a high PageRank; they should also have content that is relative to your site. For example, if you have a site about NASCAR racing, you'll get more oomph with a link from another NASCAR-related site than you would with a link from a site about Barbie dolls. Relevance matters.

Create a Clear Organization and Hierarchy

The GoogleBot crawler can find more content on a web page and more web pages on a website if that content and those pages are in a clear hierarchical organization.

Let's look at page organization first. You want to think of each web page as a mini-outline. The most important information should be in major headings, with lesser information in subheadings beneath the major headings. One way to do this is via standard HTML heading tags, like this:

<h1>Most important information
 <h2>Less important information
    <h3>Least important information

This approach is also appropriate for your entire site layout. Your home page should contain the most important information, with subsidiary pages branching out from that containing less important informationand even more subpages branching out from those. The most important info should be visible when a site is first accessed via the home page; additional info should be no more than a click or two away.

This hierarchical organization is easily seen when you create a sitemap for your users. (This is distinct from the sitemap you create for and submit to Google Sitemaps.) A visible sitemap, looking for all the world like a big outline, not only makes it easier for visitors to find information on your site, it also gives the GoogleBot crawler some very meaty information to process.

Include Appropriate Keywords

Just as important as a page's layout is the page's content. You want to make sure that each and every page on your site contains the keywords that users might use to search for your pages. If your site is all about drums, make sure your pages include words like drums, percussion, sticks, heads, drumset, cymbals, snare, and the like. Try to think through how you would search for this information, and work those keywords into your content.

Put the Most Important Information First

Think about hierarchy and think about keywords, and then think about how these two concepts work together. That's right, you want to place the most important keywords higher up on your page. The GoogleBot will only crawl so far, and you don't want it to give up before key information is found. In addition, PageRank is partially determined by content; the more important the content looks to be on a page (as determined by placement on the page), the higher the PageRank will be.

Make the Most Important Information Look Important

Google also looks to highlighted text to determine what's important on a page. It follows, then, that you should make an effort to format keywords on your page as bold or italic.

Use Text Instead of Images

Here's something you might not think about. At present, Google parses only text content; it can't figure out what a picture or graphic is about, unless you describe it in the text. So if you use graphic buttons or banners (instead of plain text) to convey important information, Google simply won't see it. You need to put every piece of important information somewhere in the text of the pageeven if it's duplicated in a banner or graphic.

If you do use images on your site, make sure you use the <ALT> tag for each image, and assign meaningful keywords to the image via this tag. GoogleBot will read the <ALT> tag text; it can't figure out what an image is without it.

Link via Text

Following on the previous tip, make sure that you link from one page to another on your site via text linksnot via graphics or fancy JavaScript menus. Google will find and use the text links to crawl other pages on your site; if the links are non-text, GoogleBot might not be able to find the rest of your site.

Incorporate <META> Tags

When calculating PageRank, Google not only considers the visible content on a page; it also evaluates the content of key HTML tagsin particular, your site's <META> tags. You want to make sure that you use <META> tags in your page's code, and assign important keywords to each of those tags.

Table 36.2. <META> Tag Attributes

Attribute	Description
DESCRIPTION	Provides a brief description of the page's content
KEYWORDS	Lists all important keywords that might be used to search this page
ROBOTS	The NOINDEX parameter is used if you don't want this page included in the Google index

The <META> tag, which (along with the <TITLE> tag) is placed in the head of your HTML document, can be used to supply all sorts of information about your document. You can insert multiple <META> tags into the head of your document, and each tag can contain a number of different attributes. The most common attributes are listed in Table 36.2:

You use separate <META> tags to define different attributes, using the following format:

<META name="attribute" content="items">

Replace attribute with the name of the particular attribute, and items with the keywords or description of that attribute.

For example, to include a description of your web page, you'd enter this line of code:

<META name="DESCRIPTION" content="All about stamp collecting">

To add keywords that GoogleBot can index, enter this line of code:

[View full width]
<META name="KEYWORDS" content="stamps, stamp collecting, collectable stamps, stamp 
history, stamp prices">

Note that you separate each keyword by a comma, and that a "keyword" can actually be a multiple-word phrase. You can include up to 10 keywords with this attribute.

Finally, if you don't want Google to include this page in its search index, enter the following line of code:

<META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">

You can include all three of these <META> attributes in the head of your HTML document, each in separate lines of code, one after another, like this:

<META name="DESCRIPTION" content="All about stamp collecting">
<META name="KEYWORDS" content="stamps, stamp collecting, collectable
stamps, stamp history, stamp prices">
<META name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX">

Make Good Use of the <TITLE> Tag

The <TITLE> tag is just as important as the <META> tagwhich is why you shouldn't fall into the trap of assigning only your site name to the tag. Instead, the <TITLE> tag should contain two to three important keywords, and then followed by the site name. Google places major importance on the <TITLE> tag when determining a site's content; you want to make sure that your site's most important content is listed within this tag.

For example, if your stamp collecting site is called The Stamp Shop, you might use the following <TITLE> tag:

<TITLE>The Stamp Shop - Collecting, Prices, and History</TITLE>

Use Heading Tags Instead of CSS

This is a tough one. Most cutting-edge web designers have switched from standard heading tags (<H1>, <H2>, and so on) to Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) <DIV> and <SPAN> codes. That's unfortunate, as Google looks for the old-fashioned heading tags to determine the content (and thus the PageRank) of your site. If you want to optimize your ranking in the Google index, you'll switch back to the <H1> and <H2> tags for your page headingsand make sure you use the content of those tags wisely.

Update Your Code Frequently

GoogleBot crawls the Web with some frequency, looking for pages that have changed or updated content. If your site hasn't changed in awhile, this can affect your PageRank. So you'll want to make sure you change your content on a regular basis; in particular, changing the content of your heading tags can have a big impact on how "fresh" Google thinks your site is.

Use RSS Feeds for Dynamic Content

Contrary to the previous advice, Google actually has a problem tracking some frequently updated contentin particular, the type of dynamic content generated by blogs, news sites, and the like. Put simply, GoogleBot doesn't crawl dynamic pages as well as it does static pages. (It has to do with how long it takes some dynamic pages to load; spiders only allocate a certain amount of time per page before they move on to the next site to index.)

There are two solutions to this problem. One is to use a content management system (CMS) that loads fast enough to appease the GoogleBot crawler. The second solution is to publish your dynamic content as an RSS feed. This second solution is probably the best one, as Google does a really good job digesting RSS feeds to populate its search index. When in doubt, make sure that you generate an RSS feed for all your dynamic content.

Use an OPML File

Including an OPML file on your site can also help increase your PageRank. That's because an OPML file contains in-depth hierarchical information about the way the data on your pages is organized; Google can make good use of this information in a way that benefits your site's ranking.

For Google to use your OPML file, it should describe content that exists on a page that can be reached from your site's main page. In addition, the OPML file must be a reasonably close representation of the actual page. Finally, you must provide a link from the page to the OPML file, so the GoogleBot crawler can find it.