What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?

Question

What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?

Answer 1

The absolute best long term strategy is to have lots of relevant content that is updated frequently and easily accessible to your site's visitors.

Answer 2

Here are some rules I follow:

• Try not to repeat content.
• Try to get linked from other, relevant and high quality websites.
• Try to make sure your outgoing links relevant to the content of your site (rel="nofollow" for ones that aren't, such as ads).
• Give each page a relevant (and unique) title.
• Add in a meta-description to each page describing the contents or purpose. Keep in mind that meta-descriptions are not used as much today.
• Mark up your site using schema.org and authorship markup, if applicable, to display rich snippets.
• Build a sitemap for your website and submit it using the Google WebMaster tools.
• Keep content unique and relevant to your website.
• Use HTML correctly (header tags, titles and alt attributes on images).
• Try to use relevant keywords in the URL.
• Ensure a fast load time.

Generally, if you follow these rules, your domain will naturally rank better with Google over time. If you try to speed this process up, using things like keyword spamming on your website, you are likely to be picked up and blacklisted by Google so avoid this wherever possible.

Answer 3

The absolute best way to improve your position in Google is to have many other websites linking to your site. This is why text links in blogs are so popular- Google uses them primarily in place of meta tag keywords, as they're usually more accurate.

As described by tnorthcutt, having lots of relevant content is also helpful, as Google can read and associate your site with it's content. Additionally, in an ideal world, having lots of relevant content will cause others to link to your site.

Answer 4

To boost your rank:

• update site regularly
• get good back links over time
• use Google Keyword tool and Google trends to see what content is most relevant
• make your site accessible
• make your site light weight and use less http requests
• link to great websites
• use more content then HTML
• use friendly URLs
• use a domain that is up in years
• link to page within your own site
• provide a robots.txt and sitemap to Google Web Master tools
• post quality over quantity
• optimize your website for users not just search (kinda odd but true)
• use web standards
• use microformats, RDFa, ARIA and schema.org.

Answer 5

Search engine strategies are to designed to find the best or most relevant content, not just the loudest. If someone finds a way to trick the search engine and get high rankings today, it will likely not work tomorrow. Don't make the mistake of trying to outsmart the search engines - good pages with good content, structure, and standards support will always win.

Answer 6

To answer the question directly, the ONLY ways for a page to gain high rankings in Google are:

1. Be relevant for the search term. This means having relevant text/keywords on the page (including the title, headings and URL).
2. Have lots of links pointing to your page, preferably from quality sites that are well-ranked themselves.

That's not to say the other answers posted are wrong, but they are all indirect versions of those two key rules. Having the best and freshest content means you will naturally gather more links over time. (Although I'll concede, the new "speed factor" doesn't really fit either of these criteria.)

Answer 7

Rel='nofollow' all untrusted outgoing links.

Answer 8

These are both just from personal experience, so take them for what they're worth:

• Ensure that your site is reliable. If Google picks up a lot of error codes when indexing your site, you may see a decrease in your placement in the results.

• Don't change too much at once. If you're constantly churning your site structure, titles, in-text keywords and other factors, Google doesn't ever get a chance to "settle in".

Answer 9

A lot of people look for technical tricks for SEO and ignore the big picture. You need both. Your SEO (and business) strategy is every bit as important as SEO tactics. There are more than 200 SEO factors that go into rankings, but here are a few of the more important SEO factors that I've experienced, both tactical and strategic:

• Have a website worth visiting. If your website isn't designed for users first, most of the time it won't do well in the search engines.
• Make your site crawlable. Don't rely on Flash or JavaScript navigation. If you need to use JavaScript, use it to enhance an existing (X)HTML menu, not create it. You won't even need a sitemap if your site is crawlable in the first place (but it doesn't hurt). RSS feeds also help you get crawled.
• Do your keyword research using Google's Keyword Tool. I guarantee that you're missing out on traffic opportunities if you don't do this (and most people don't). Take 5 minutes to make sure that your content is hitting the most popular search terms for its subject matter. It's worth it.
• Make a bigger website. Backlinks matter and internal links from your own pages count. The easiest, surest, and most efficient way to get backlinks is to increase the number of pages on your site. The bigger your search engine footprint, the more weight you have to throw around. This is one of the reasons blogs are recommended for SEO.
• Get your title right. You get 65 characters to create an on-topic incentive for the user to click on your search engine listing. Use the opportunity wisely. Your best keywords should be in the title. However, it's not just about using the right keywords; it's also about catching the user's attention while still signalling that your page is going to be relevant and helpful to them. Use Michael Masterson's Four U's Method: Be Unique. Be Useful. Be Urgent. Be Ultra-Specific. Stronger titles use more U's. Remember that your title is often used by social media sites to link to your page as well.
• Get your anchor text right. Use keywords that are also helpful to your users. Never use the infamous 'Click Here' or 'More...' text as a link.
• Get a handle on duplicate content. It's far too easy to create duplicate content. http://example.com, http://example.com/, http://www.example.com, and http://www.example.com/ are all considered different URLS. URL parameters also create duplicates: http://example.com?a=1&b=2 and http://example.com?b=2&a=1 are both different URLs. Use Apache or whatever server you're using to manage your redirect rules so this doesn't happen. This needs to be a consideration from the beginning and should be solved both programatically and with server redirects.
• Don't waste time asking for links. There is no bigger waste of time and money, IMO, than emailing other websites offering to do link exchanges. Think about the time spent searching for relevant websites, emailing, responding, and implementing a link exchange. What's your hourly wage? Now think about economies of scale and how many times you have to do that to make a discernible difference for every page of your website. There is no way that you can possibly come out on top. There are easier ways to get links.
• Make your site sharable. All those little social media widgets? They might be annoying, but when used properly, they make it easier for your users to share your content. The caveat here is proper context. Privacy policies, terms of use, registration, and other pages of that ilk are probably not good candidates for a widget.
• Viral content works. But you need to use it wisely. Not every announcement on your site is going to be or should be viral. It has to make sense and it needs to be well-thought-out. Ask yourself objectively, why would someone link to this? If you can't think of a good answer, you should go back to the drawing board. Again, the 4 U's help here.
• Incentivize linking. A great way to kickstart a viral campaign or even a more moderate but steadily growing external link profile. Think contests and giveaways, but also think StackOverflow's badge widgets.
• Build a community An audience of loyal readers will link to and share your content naturally. User-generated content increases your website's footprint and also incentivizes linking.
• Remember the big picture. Why are you doing SEO in the first place? What is the purpose of your website? It's easy to focus so much SEO that you lose sight of what you're trying to do. If you're trying to make money with your site, don't forget that you also need to focus on the usability, the design, the copy, the offer, the product, the checkout process, etc. SEO is only a small part of that.

If you're interested in more details, I wrote an article on my website about basic SEO tips which you can reference for more info.

Edit: Incidentally, one of the reasons StackOverflow does so well in the search engines is because it has an enormous community that continually produces keyword-laden pages. It gets a lot of the basic tactical SEO right too, but this is an excellent example of big-picture thinking that most people ignore. SEO is built into the design of the community as an extension of the way the community functions. That wasn't an accident.

Answer 10

Don't forget the concept of Domain Aging. A new domain is naturally going to suffer a disadvantage.

Can't emphasize enough how important I think following W3 standards and using semantic markup are.

Answer 11

This is also personal experience: I recently made a tutorial on the topic of iPhone UINavigationControllers on my own own site and found it was the number one Google result for "uinavigationcontroller" after about 2 months.

In my experience Google bases a lot of its rankings on uptime, load time, HTML of the actual site, having a Google sitemap and signing up for the Google Webmaster Tools.

Sticking to H1,H2..P HTML tags, ensure 99% uptime and heavily cache the site so it loads in less than a second or two. Then watch where you're going wrong with the webmaster tools.

And try using the Stackoverflow trick - put the keywords first in the title, then the name of the page.

Answer 12

1. Relevant keywords in the text of the article
2. sites linking to your sites with the same keywords
3. h1/h2 tags
4. Relevant title
5. Relevant URL
6. meta tags
7. link text - http://www.google.com/?q=click+here :)

Answer 13

Google and algorithms are all from humans concern.

you should abstract from the idea of following rules and indications but instead, think on your own and what would be the best for your users (readability, accessibility, ...).

For the technical part (charset, metadatas, content elements ...) this would overcome with the time while you feed your experience, again if you code in good manners and use a well-written syntax then Google won't mess with your website...

IMHO, SEO is a MARKETING word...

Answer 14

backlinks is actually very important, how the anchor are, especially if your ancor link if using image then your tag is related to the link.

bookmarking helps too. and im using the following:

• http://digg.com - for fast google indexing

Answer 15

Here is some new advice from Google:

Avoid these common mistakes

1. Having no value proposition: Try not to assume that a site should rank #1 without knowing why it’s helpful to searchers (and better than the competition :)

2. Segmented approach: Be wary of setting SEO-related goals without making sure they’re aligned with your company’s overall objectives and the goals of other departments. For example, in tandem with your work optimizing product pages (and the full user experience once they come to your site), also contribute your expertise to your Marketing team’s upcoming campaign. So if Marketing is launching new videos or a more interactive site, be sure that searchers can find their content, too.

3. Time-consuming workarounds: Avoid implementing a hack rather than researching new features or best practices that could simplify development (e.g., changing the timestamp on an updated URL so it’s crawled more quickly instead of easily submitting the URL through Fetch as Googlebot).

4. Caught in SEO trends: Consider spending less time obsessing about the latest “trick” to boost your rankings and instead focus on the fundamental tasks/efforts that will bring lasting visitors.

5. Slow iteration: Aim to be agile rather than promote an environment where the infrastructure and/or processes make improving your site, or even testing possible improvements, difficult.

Six fundamental SEO tips

1. Do something cool: Make sure your site stands out from the competition -- in a good way!

2. Include relevant words in your copy: Try to put yourself in the shoes of searchers. What would they query to find you? Your name/business name, location, products, etc., are important. It's also helpful to use the same terms in your site that your users might type (e.g., you might be a trained “flower designer” but most searchers might type [florist]), and to answer the questions they might have (e.g., store hours, product specs, reviews). It helps to know your customers.

3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture: Create unique title tags and meta descriptions; include Rich Snippets markup from schema.org where appropriate. Have intuitive navigation and good internal links.

4. Sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools: Help us communicate with you, especially when we notice something awry with your site.

5. Attract buzz: Natural links, +1s, likes, follows... In every business there's something compelling, interesting, entertaining, or surprising that you can offer or share with your users. Provide a helpful service, tell fun stories, paint a vivid picture and users will share and reshare your content.

6. Stay fresh and relevant: Keep content up-to-date and consider options such as building a social media presence (if that’s where a potential audience exists) or creating an ideal mobile experience if your users are often on-the-go.

Answer 16

Work with all On page and Off Page optimization for your targeted websites.

Content must be unique with competent terms. Get top quality back links from only relevant websites with do follow and also get some no follow links.

Whenever you get links from other websites please chk the following criteria:

Page Rank; IP Location; MozRank; Domain Age; LRD; PA & DA; Check Irrelevant links is found ignore it and etc...,

Be relevant for the search keywords. This means having relevant text/keywords on the page (including the title, headings and URL).

Have lots of links pointing to your page, preferably from quality sites that are well-ranked themselves.That's not to say the other answers posted are wrong, but they are all indirect versions of those two key rules. Having the best and freshest content means you will naturally gather more links over time.