Google rankings for beginners

Besides having more money than anyone bar God, Google is still the top beast in the internet search engine jungle. According to new research published last week by Pew, around 59% - 61% of all USA based web searches in June 2008 were made using Google. Its competitors are being left very much in the shade– for the time being anyway.

Getting a foothold on the web’s premier site is therefore incredibly important – and it’s also crucial that your site is as far up Google’s search pages as possible. As Red Cardinal reported in 2006, only 15% of users look at the second page of their Google search, less than 1% go to the third page. After that you’re into a serious number of 0.0 digits.

But how do you make sure your site is prominently placed?

Most people believe that Google’s page rankings are based purely on keywords and hits. It is certainly true that both of these are important, but they are only two of a melee of factors that are drilled through a complicated formula to produce the search results that pop up on your screen. Other elements include the positioning of keywords on the webpage (i.e. in the title, main body of the text, etc), how often a site is updated and the number of times a page is linked to by others sites - and the value of those linking sites (to see how far you can push your head before it explodes – take a look at this page for the specific page ranking formula).

Tapping into this complex array of determinants is not simple, not least because a lot of the factors rely upon on external popularity (hits/links) that beginners have to encourage from scratch.

However, its certainly not impossible. After less than two weeks, Skinflakes is already registering on the first page of the Google search for its name. Today`s how to guide gives you some basic tips on how to get your site in a position to climb the Google rankings.

But I`m not going to tell porkies. It’s not easy or certain that you`ll get your site highly mentioned even with our guide until you have a bit of popularity behind you. So, its worth being a little bit cheeky and using some backdoor approaches that allow you to piggy back your site onto more established sites. You won’t achieve a direct link, but as current search engine results for skinflakes and skinflakes blog on Google demonstrate (have a scroll down) you can get your site mentioned a couple of times prominently on that crucial first page.

Here are three quick and sneaky tips:

1. Comment on established and well viewed sites. By engaging with other sites that are highly valued (i.e. well linked too, well visited) and leaving a reference to your site you are likely to be thrown up early on Google searches. We recently commented on an interesting Graham Jones article and left our taglines – hey presto within a day we were on Google’s front page for skinflakes searches. Be careful not to abuse this though, make sure you have something to say about the article – certainly don’t just do it for pure advertising sake – or the moderator will quite rightly kick you into touch. A further spin off of commenting in this way is that people will hopefully want to find out more about you by visiting your site and keeping tabs on your other comments.

2. Create a RSS reader page. Putting together an RSS reader pages with any of the main RSS feeder providers will also boost your chances of heading into that first page. You can learn how to do this from last week’s entry and you can sign up to our pageflakes page here.

3. Create an Amazon booklist. Amazon is obviously one of the most visited sites on the web and by creating a list of recommended books through a profile page, you also increase your chances of being highlighted by Google. Simply go into your profile (make sure it contains a link to your site), create a relevant list of books and submit to Amazon. Again, don’t abuse this, make sure the books are relevant to your site and that, well, you’ve actually read them ... Read the skinflakes recommendations here.

How to ... basic tips to boost your Google rankings

1. If possible, choose a distinctive name for your site or blog. Don’t just call it “My blog”, “John Smith products” or employ any other common terms that are likely to already be in use. Something well used, means more competition and a harder climb up those rankings. And anyway a distinctive name will make it easier for people to remember your website.

2. Make sure your site name is mentioned as early on as possible in your web address. If there is any text in front of the web address – say http://www.infoskinflakes.com/ - then the “info” will be taken as a main tag for the page, hence potentially lowering your ranking.

3. Ensure that the keywords that people are likely to type into their search are mentioned first in the title of your webpage. Hence don’t write “Press release: Skinflakes – new mobile phone launched by Skinflakes”, instead title it “Skinflakes mobile phone launched – Skinflakes press release”.

4. As we have done at the top of our blog, write down the keywords that describe what your blog or webpage is about as both an introduction tool and so that Google latches onto those words and associates them with your site. Promience in the text is a key thing Google looks for.

5. Update the content of your site regularly. Google does scan how often a site is refreshed and uses this as an indicator of how active and current it is – rewarding the most active with higher page rankings.

6. When you have completed a post – get it distributed so people can link to it. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg and social networking sites like Facebook to spread it. The more people who see it, visit it and link it, the higher your page and site will go in the rankings.