How to get a better Google rating
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Hello,
I’m adding this topic hoping to get a few ideas and suggestions on what might be the reasons for not getting a better ranking for a site that I co-manage, jonlord.org.
I run another site, stevemorse.com, and I remember back in the day it got to the top really quickly and it’s still at number 1. In my experience, sites that are official usually end up there for a number of reasons.
However, in this case, with jonlord.org, it seems the site falls under the radar somehow. I fear it might have something to do with the domain redirect. I’m thinking having it hosted on a proper FTP rather than the jonlord.org / jonlord.wordpress.com setup would increase the site’s chances of getting a good ranking on Google. What do you think?
The URL has been submitted to Google and we have waited for quite a few weeks now, and my impression is that you usually can see a change in Googles’ indexes after a couple of days.
I also run Google webmaster tools, but haven’t found any real pointers to why the site doesn’t appear higher in Google when simply searching for “jon lord”.
Any suggestions or ideas on how to improve the site’s ranking would be most appreciated!
Thank you,
Daniel -
Have you already searched the forum? There are numerous threads on the subject. I mean, dozens.
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Timethief also has some very good posts on blog promotion here: http://wpbloggingtips.wordpress.com/category/promotion/
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<p class=”TableOfContents”> Better Google Rankings
- Do you know how Google ranks pages?
- Do you know if Google has indexed your page?
- Do you know your Page Rank?
- Do you create new page rank for yourself?
- Do you conserve your page rank?
- Do you concentrate your page rank where it will do the most good?
- How many inbound links do you have?
- Do you use enough keywords?
- Do you monitor the progress of your keywords?
- Are your <title>, <h1>, and <h2> tags descriptive?
- Do you use META keywords and description tags?
- Is your URL consistently in the same case?
- Do your links have relevancy to the page you’re linking to?
- Do you make your data-driven pages easier to find?
- Do your inbound picture links use attributes?
- Do you avoid the temptation of link farms?
- Do you avoid using frames on your website?
- Does your Flash website have an alternate HTML site?
- Do you use include files for your JavaScript?
- Do you submit all your software to download sites?
- Are your webpages less than 101k?
- Do you use your Robots.txt file effectively?
- Do you redirect pages correctly to make your website search engine friendly?
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BTW – The foregoing came from here http://www.ssw.com.au/SSW/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterGoogleRankings.aspx
20 Handy Hints on getting a better search engine ranking within Google
http://www.site-report.com/google_ranking.php
The list below shows 20 handy hints to assist with websites ranking better within Google (and the other major search engines!)
1. Make sure that each page has a different title
2. Ensure that each page has a different and informative description
3. Don’t overstuff your keywords meta tag with too many keywords.The keywords meta tag are ignored by many search engines. Use for common misspellings of words on the page.
4. Make sure that your webpages validate at the w3c website
5. Make sure that each page in your site has interesting content to ensure that other sites want to link to your site.
6. Don’t use a splash page for your site – Splash pages may look good, but can act as a barrier to both visitors and search engines.
7. Avoid using Javascript menus which search engines aren’t able to crawl
8. Make sure you don’t place valuable content in images -alll your valuable content should be textual and not presented in images, Flash movies, animated gifs, etc.
9. Make sure that if your site is dynamically generated, that you are not using too many URL parameters (3 maximum)Google will pick up page with more than 3 URL parameters, but some of those pages may end up as ‘supplementary results’ (these are second class results). Ensure that you don’t pass session IDs (or anything that may look like a session ID) in URLs.
10. Don’t use bulk search engine submission programmes or services
11. Don’t use unnecessary meta tags (e.g. author, copyright, classification etc)
12. Don’t prevent search engines from visiting your site when they want to by excluding them with the robots tag
13. Try not to use deprecated markup such as font tags
14. Try to use CSS instead of HTML and tables for styling – By separating styling from content using CSS, you reduce the complexity of each of your website’s pages and make site wide changes easier. Also, this helps increase the content to HTML ratio, thereby possibly helping with search engine ranking.
15. Reference an included JavaScript file rather than using it within your HTML
16. Make sure that you target keywords and phrases that are likely to be used by your target visitors
17. Include a sitemap to provide easy access to the main pages within your site
Try to keep the number of links on each page at no more than 50 – 100. Use multiple pages if required. Structure the site map for human visitors not just search engines.
18. Make sure that you include alt-text (alternative text) for all images on your site
Alt-text are the little yellow popups that are shown when you hover a mouse over the images on your site. These will benefit visitors with disabilities as well as providing a small SEO benefit.
19. Don’t get hung-up on PageRank – it’s just one measure of the importance of a page, not the only one!
20. Write for human visitors not search enginesQuick notes…
* Google focuses more on inbound links and the quality of those links than some other search engines. Read our guidelines on link building for improved search engine ranking.
* Yahoo tends to focuses more on ‘on-the-page’ factors
* When writing link text (anchor text), try to avoid using the ‘targeted phrase’ exactly. Instead, reword using variants of the ‘targeted phrase’.
* Try to get links into interior pages of your site.
* Avoid getting links into your site from every page of another site (site-wide links -
I’ve always got good Google ranking without even trying. But use key words in what you write. And try to think of the search terms that others would use when trying to search for posts on your blog. On my previous celebrity blog, I used full names of the celebrities in the title post and made sure I spelled them right. And make sure to ping your blog, get a Technorati account, and keep the WordPress.com and WordPress.org links on your blogroll which will help you in pagerank.
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There’s been a discussion on this only recently.
If you have active sitemaps for both url.com and url.wordpress.com then Google will penalise you for duplicating content.
If you want Google to put url.som at the top of its searches, then what you need to do is go to Google webmaster tools and deactivate the sitemap for url.wordpress.com , whilst leaving url.com’s Google sitemap active.
There’s a temptation to leave both active, on the false logic that it’ll give Google twice as many chances to find you. But it doesn’t work like that, and the effect is detrimental to your rankings instead.
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