Improving Google PageRank

We spend a lot of time learning about SEO and keeping up to date on the best practices to get your site ranked highly on Google. Below is a list of what we do, what we don’t do, and what you can do to help.

Some things YOU can do

• The single most important thing you can do for your google rankings is get more in-bound links to your site. In-bound links are links from other sites to your site. Tell your friends, family members, business partners, people on the street… anyone who has a website can help you by adding a link to your site on their site. The link is even more useful to you if it has your keywords in it.

  [ read technical details about linking techniques ]

  Say for instance you run a pizza shop named Joe’s Pizza, the simple way to link to the site would be:

  <a href="http://www.joespizza.com">Joe's Pizza</a>

  which works but it doesn’t have a lot of your keywords in it, a better way would be:

  <a href="http://www.joespizza.com">Brooklyn's best thin crust Pizza</a>

  another way to work in key words is with the title attribute, which doesn’t get shown until someone hovers their mouse over the link:

  <a href="http://www.joespizza.com" title="Brooklyn's Best Thin Crust Pizza">Joe's Pizza</a>

• If your site is of interest to the general public you could start or add your link to the Wikipedia page. video on editing wikipedia | more info on contributing to wikipedia
• Make sure you have unique meta “description” for each page on your site. The meta “description” tag is at the top of each page on your site and tells Google what your page is about. It’s also the short description that you see when you ‘Google’ yourself. You should write a unique description for each page, don’t recycle the same description tag for each page on your site, that is a total waste of this tag. You should make sure you include as many keywords in the description tag as possible, but don’t resort to packing keywords one after another in a list, the description should be readable, it is the thing someone is going to read that will determine if they want to follow your link.
• Another source for inbound links are paid services. If you are in an industry that has a listing service, you should list your site with them, try Googling your industry and the words ‘listing service’ and see what comes up.
• Some other ways to generate awareness of your website and get more inbound links is by signing up for social sites like linkedIn, Facebook or twitter
• Commenting on blog posts that pertain to your site and including a link to your site in the comment will help you create a lot of inbound links very quickly. Obviously we don’t condone spamming people’s blogs, the best way to do this is to get involved with the blogs in your industry and be a part of the conversations.
• If you run a business you should always setup a Google local business listing for your company via the Google Local Business Center. When you have one, people can rate you and find you easier.
• If you offer a service, encourage your clients to give you a review on Yelp.com, once you have been reviewed, you can claim your business and add more information about it
• Give it time, your pages get higher google rankings the longer they’ve existed, so when you first launch a site you start at zero, it takes time to build a good ranking.

Some things WE do

• We help google find your site by submitting your URL to Google after the site is live. Google will find your site within a few weeks to a month anyway but this speeds up the process a bit.
• We separate your content from your layout using external CSS style sheets. This increases the density of keywords in your HTML pages.
• We separate your content from your behavior using javascript. This ensures that Google will have no problem reading your content and following your links.
• Make sure your have alt tags for all images, alt tags are a short text description of the image which are read by google to identify the photo. Alt tags on images are also required for accessibility, someone who is blind will be read the alt tags when they get to your images.
• We add alternate content for all flash movies in HTML and use Javascript to hide this content when flash is available. The result is the best of both worlds, flash content for your users to see and HTML content for Google. In some cases we also use XML documents to feed content into a Flash movie, XML is another format that google can index. NOTE: Google Recently announced that it has developed a technology to read the text content inside flash movies without the use of alternate content, but we will still be creating alt-content to add accessability to flash websites.
• We add relevant title attributes to elements on your page (mainly links) when needed. The title tag can be used to elaborate on the purpose of an element, you get a small popup with the title text next to your mouse pointer in most browsers when this tag is present.
• Add a title tag for the page that has both the name of the page and the name of the company. (in that order)
• Have an H1 (highest level heading) for each page describing what the page is about. The H1 tag (along with the title tag) are weighted most heavily by Google and will pull the most weight for the keywords you have in them.
• keywords in URLs and domain names. Another thing that’s important is to have the actual name of your file have the key words that are most important to the page. URLs can’t always have keywords, but when possible we try to include them.

Some things we DON’T do

• We never use tables for layout. We only use tables on our sites for data as they are meant to be used. Marking up data tables with a caption tag if necessary.
• We never pack the page with keywords that aren’t part of the normal flow of text. The best way to work words into your page is to make them readable by humans as well as computers. These techniques are discouraged by Google and they do all they can to penalize you for using them. Basically you don’t benefit from being sneaky.
• We no longer use the meta “keywords” tag: Google, Yahoo, and most other search engines, no longer use the meta keywords tag, so it is a waste of time for you to use it. The best way to get keywords into your page is by having content that is rich in keywords on your page.