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The Budget Webmaster?s 6 Step Guide to Improving Existing Rankings in Google
You know the scenario. You get an occasional click from Google for a certain keyword. You go to find out why you aren’t getting more clicks, and you find out that you’re ranked in the 30’s, 50’s, or heaven forbid, the 300’s. “Great”, you think, “I finally get ranked for a good keyword and it’s a worthless ranking”.
Not necessarily.
If you got ranked for a keyword you wanted At All, the game’s not over yet. If your site’s content is geared towards that subject, you can get your ranking in search engines increased, at no cost. How?
The first thing you want to do is find out how well you are ranked for this keyword. For Google in particular, this used to be a difficult chore. In the old days of 2003, you’d spend your valuable time doing a search on your desired keyword, then a sub-search for your site, and crawling through pages of listings to find out exactly where you stood.
Now there is hope in the form of the following website. Direct your browser to:
http://www.googlerankings.com/index.php
You can use this site to find out what number you come up for in the Google listings, which can be very powerful information if used correctly. If you’re ranked in the top 1000, you have a shot at raising your listing for that page by tweaking the page to be a little more relevant.
So, secondly, you have to know how good a shot you have at getting a better listing. Go to:
http://www.searchguild.com/difficulty/
I posted a tip about this a month ago, and it’s also in the free optimization Guide I released the week of March 7th. It tells you how hard it is to rank well for certain keywords in Google. You’ll need a free Google API key to use it.
Now that you know your chances, the third piece of information you need to know is how much traffic you can expect. Digital Point has a free tool that gives an approximation of how many hits per day a good ranking gets. Access it here:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Our fifth step is to take the term you chose and optimize your page.
This site does periodic reports on the search engines, and their February report gives their analysis of what the best ranking pages in Google have in common. And as a free bonus, it will also tell you what Yahoo wants. Follow the following link for details-http://www.gorank.com
Now that you know what to shoot for, you need to know how the page you want will measure up- you need to calculate your keyword density. You can also do the sixth step at gorank.com - it has a free tool that will calculate it for you. Prepare your page with that in mind, re-upload, and you’re almost done.
Great, you’re all set. Now you should submit your site to Google, right?
Wrong. Absolutely not. If you can help it, you should never, ever submit any page of your site to Google. Let it find you. HOW it finds you can affect your page rank. I don’t mean that there is a standard penalty for submitting. There’s been speculation on that for a while but I have yet to prove it matters.
What I DO know from personal experience and testing on my member’s sites, is that getting the Googlebot search engine spider to happen upon your site shaves up to 6 weeks off the standard time it takes for indexing. You can show up in Google in as little as 4 days.
Which site links to you can also affect your Google Page Rank. While this is not as important as it once was, it still carries significant weight? my site didn’t start getting spidered on a daily basis until my Page Rank increased to 5.
So even if the spider comes to your site on a Monthly basis, you’re better off waiting for the spider to come back by. That’s the seventh step, let your page be re-discovered with it’s great new changes.
And yes, there’s an even faster, better way to get Google.com’s search engine spider to re-index that page, but that’s another article, isn’t it?
If Content is King, then surely Relevance is Queen!
There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories as to why these things happen. It is easy as a webmaster to get caught up in these webs of intrigue. You get email notes about them, you view so-called experts’ thoughts on bulletin Boards - hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles!
Well I hope so anyway….
The big driver for webmasters currently appears to be content and link building. While link building is important I don’t believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance, the Kingdom is doomed. Sorry I will stop the analogy now! 
If your site is about finance, then finance content is best supported by finance link exchanges. Relevance! If your site is about finance, then finance content supported by casino link exchanges from a PR8 site while in the short term may help,?but all the signs are saying this is not a long term strategy.
Okay,so what is the best strategy?
Keep EVERYTHING relevant. It is that simple. Make sure that you only swap or link to sites that are relevant to the content on your pages. Yes I am suggesting link exchanging on pages of your site not a links page. Links pages seem to be being abused. There are rumours that pages called links, resources or partners are not passing page rank. You could be wasting your time building links that are not giving you any benefits! Delivering relevant links from relevant content is the future. Look at sites such as www.bbc.co.uk or www.independent.co.uk. News sites have the right idea. They have 2 or 3 relevant internal links to other articles on the same topic or links to internal tools that are related. These usually can be found at the right hand side of the article. They also then have weblinks or external links to sites of interest that are related to the topic. These are relevant! Another benefit of this is that with a content rich site you can add hundreds of links quite legitimately and really add some value both to your Rankings and your users. With a content-poor site it is difficult, you have to add link pages or create a links directory. A five page site will need to add 10 or 12 good link pages to compete and even then with algorithm changes, this may not be prudent. Having a site with 400 pages means you can easily add 3 links per page, so you have 1200 link options straight away.
Hopefully this explains that relevance runs a close second to content.Always bear in mind when writing content that relevant links will not only boost your search engine rankings, but you will also add a service to your visitors.
What You Need to Know About Choosing A Domain Name
Aside from the nuts and bolts of where to register your domain name and purchasing a good economical hosting service, there are a few things to know about buying a good domain name, that only experience can teach. Here are a few tips to get you started on the right foot:
1. Buy only “.com” and don’t trouble yourself with the others. Although the domain name players have gone to some trouble to publicize and market to us about the availability of other extensions such as .org, .net, .us and others…there is still no real reason to buy anything but “.com.”
If you currently have a domain name that is not a “.com,” I strongly suggest you obtain it. Or, if that’s not possible, consider finding a new domain name.
The rationale is simple: if the point of having a website is to get people to visit it, the best rule of thumb is to make it easy to remember. If your customers have to think in order to get to your website, and maybe even have to type in a wrong domain first before they finally reach you…you want to change that so they don’t.
2. Buy your own personal name. What better way to make it easy for your customers to find you? As you become better known online, and as you build your customer database, it will become increasingly important for your customers to be able to find you based on your personal name.
Buying your personal name allows you to build credibility for your brand identity and makes it easy to “Google” you. Ever tried typing in just your first and last names at Google? Try it and see what happens. If you aren’t showing up in the results, you will want to work on this. And buying your own personal name as a domain name is a simple and very effective way to get going.
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