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PageRank and Improving your site's ranking

The following list covers the basics of improving your site's ranking. If you do this, you'll do well!

  • 1. Submit your website to the major search engines
    For starters, you should do Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
  • 2. Get a Google account
    Creating a Google account is quite straightforward. You can then discover some really useful and important things using Google's webmaster tools, such as errors webbots have when crawling your pages, what keywords Google is associating with you, an indication of your page's PageRank (see below), and what searches are hitting you and where you are appearing on them.
  • 3. Submit a sitemap to Google
    Again, submitting a sitemap is quite straightforward. This helps Google know what all of your pages are.
  • 4. Get listed on relevant directories
    This is described further below.
  • 5. Encourage reciprocal links
    This can be by seeking them out, advertising for them on your web pages (include the words "reciprocal link" to make it easier for people to seek you out), or by suggesting it to your current customers. However, be wary of websites offering you thousands of reciprocal links at the touch of a button - Google is wise to this, and your ranking may actually suffer as a result.
  • 6. Encourage one-way links in
    This is described further below.
  • 7. Check out your page structure and website structure
    Make sure it's obvious to Google what your important pages and keywords are - for instance, have a consistent url for your home page. Google provides guidelines on this.
  • 8. Make sure webbots find it easy to follow your links
    Have a robots.txt file, make sure that every page is reachable by at least one static text link, and prefer static pages to dynamic pages.
  • 9. Look at the competition
    Type in the search phrase you want to be top of, look at who is top, understand why they're top (what's special about their site? who's linking to them?), and outdo them.
  • 10. Start monitoring your position in Google
    You could keep track of your PageRank, number of links in, etc., so you can see how you're progressing.

Most businesses with websites want their websites to be found by potential customers. That's why they went to the trouble of investing time and money into their website.

Wanting a website to 'be found' usually translates into coming up reasonably high on Google (or whatever search engine), if a potential customer types in something approximating to that business. So, if your business is plumbing in Oxfordshire, and someone types "Oxfordshire plumber" into Google, you'll be hoping that your website is up there somewhere in front of them.

For this, two things must happen - one directly under your control, and one only partially under your control.

  • 1. It must be clear to Google that your website is to do with plumbing in Oxfordshire.
    This is under your control - you should make sure Google knows about your website, can crawl the pages on your website, and can find the relevant words on your pages. It's not that hard - see the checklist above.
  • 2. Your page must be 'popular'.

This is where things start to get tricky. To determine your page's 'popularity', Google calculates something called your page's PageRank. The calculation works something like this:

  • Initially, every page on the internet starts with a PageRank of 1.
  • Then, on an ongoing basis, each page has its PageRank recalculated, as follows:
PR = 0.15 + 0.85(PR/NL) + 0.85(PR/NL) + ...
  • The interpretation of this formula is that each page that links to you can cast votes, equal to that page's PageRank. How many votes your page gets is determined by how many votes the linking page had to cast, and how many links it spread its votes across. The factor of 0.85 (or thereabouts) is related to the chance that somebody following links will keep going and not give up. In this simple form, the PageRank is therefore a measure of the likelihood that someone will arrive at your page purely by chance.
  • About once every three months, the PageRank is then converted into a number between 0 and 10 (with 10 being the best) called the Toolbar PageRank, for use in Google's browser toolbar.

I simplify. The description above misses a number of features - for instance the relative contexts of the two pages, which is what makes complementary links important; the effect of this is probably to increase the chance that somebody following the links will keep going. The formula given above is a simple version, based on the original published PageRank formula. Google continually improve and refine the formula, but its current form is of course a closely guarded secret.

Stepping back a little, a flaw in this whole approach is that this is 'popular' in the internet world, not the real world. Your company might have thousands of satisfied customers and be incredibly popular. But if those customers haven't linked to you in their personal, Google-indexed websites, then in the internet world you won't be that 'popular'. Still, Google has to measure popularity somehow, and for better or worse it uses PageRank.

So, having your website found depends partially on having other pages link to you.

How do you do this? There are two ways.

  • You can exchange reciprocal links with another site.
    This is a great way to get your website off the ground; without something like this to kick-start your popularity, you'll never attract potential customers, or other people who may want to link to you - see the next point for more about this. (If you can't wait for your PageRank to grow, you can always have a Sponsored Link on Google's search results - see ).

    The ideal reciprocal links are complementary, not competitive - please read more about how to do this through SectorPrime. To find other reciprocal links, you can also use our reciprocal link finder and our friend-of-a-friend tool. If you don't mind competitive links, see who's top of the results you want to be top of, see who links to that website, and consider seeing if they will link to you too.

    You will probably also want to use a link checker to keep track of your reciprocal links.
  • You can encourage people to link to you voluntarily.
    How? By providing a useful web page (information) that no one else is providing, and giving it away.

This last point is worth exploring. Your business can improve by giving something away.

Initially this sounds like a contradiction; after all, you went to the trouble of creating a website to attract potential customers, not to give things away. However, because of PageRank (i.e. popularity in the internet world), giving something away means more links, higher search rankings, more potential customers, and hence more business. The key is in what you give away:

  • It has to be useful, so that people want to link to it.
  • It has to be free, so that people can link to it if they want to.
  • It has to be information that no one else is providing, so that people who want to link to such information link to you and not to someone else.

Of course, if it's really useful then advertisers may actually pay you to be on your site. Ideally, the advertisements need to be in context, and allow you to filter out competitive advertisements. Google's AdSense is good at this (see ).

So one of the the questions that you and I need to ask ourselves is, what can I give away, that's useful, free, and is information that no one else is providing (or at least, is of a better quality than anyone else is providing)?

I hope you found this free advice particularly useful...


Resources

Web designers
Veritas Webdesigns, Birmingham, UK
Sunlust Designs, Hastings, UK
Foursquare Innovations, Leeds, UK

Search engines and directories
Add your site to Google
Add your site to MSN
Add your site to Yahoo
Add your site to SectorPrime

PageRank and Toolbar PageRank
- by the way, it's a good idea to look at your site with more than one kind of browser, to make sure that all of your visitors are seeing what you meant them to!
- Google Toolbar and other useful software.
Get just Google Toolbar
Learn more about PageRank at Wikipedia

Google resources
Create a Google account
Google's webmaster tools
How to submit a sitemap to Google
Google's quality and technical guidelines


Webmaster resources
The Web Robots Pages - How to set up a robots.txt file.
Link form validation - Free client-side validation of links.
fav2png - Free favicon.ico to png image converter.
Image Converter - Free download of multiple-format image converter.
Text field autocomplete - Pure javascript client-side autocomplete.

Webmaster tools
Reciprocal link finder - Find potential link partnes by keywords.
Friend-Of-A-Friend - Find potential link partners you don't know about through the ones you do.
RouteCheck - Free online reciprocal link checker.
Xenu's Link Sleuth - Check your site for broken links.
Website Validator - Check your site for invalid HTML.

I would be interested in expanding this section to include other useful tools and services for monitoring search ranking or improving search results (SEO, or search engine optimisation). If you have a tool or a service which respects Google's guidelines and would be genuinely useful to my visitors, please link to this site with one of the following URLs:

<a href="http://www.sectorprime.com/">SectorPrime - local business directory.</a>

or

<a href="http://www.sectorprime.com/pagerank.htm">SectorPrime - Advice and resouces for PageRank and Improving your site's ranking.</a>

and then contact me with details of how to link to you.