Search Engine Optimization Techniques for Increasing the rank of
your website on Google
An ICLEI editor’s guide for creating google friendly websites
Author: Haroon Rashid Khan, Dated: 16-5-2011
This guide will help editors in making small modifications to parts of websites which could have
a noticable impact on your sites performance in search results. These small changes become
part of an overall process that we reffer to as search engine optimization(SEO). Search engine
optimization is an important part of increasing Google page rank.
PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. PageRank is
Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that
determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank
pages, but it is an important one.
As Google keeps the secrets of their algorithm and ranking process tightly guarded, there are a
number of commonly accepted ways to increase your Google page rank. Some of these
methods have been recommended by google themselves but many of these are also based on
web site developers using simple trial and error and then tracking the statistics of their
websites.
Guidelines for editors
Link and get linked:
Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the
other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also,
the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is.
Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is
taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated. If nothing else seem possible, atleast link
yourself within your own site.
Be Original and share fresh ideas:
Write great and original content, use catchy domains, site titles. Think about the words that a
user might search for to find a piece of info on your website. For example, consider how many
sites use the keyword phrase of "sustainable procurement." The competition for ranking using
that keyword is likely to be tough. If you choose a more specific keyword like "procuraplus," the
competition is a lot easier. Do not use long key words.
Anticipate user behavior:
Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Anticipate
differences in users' understanding of your topic and offer unique, exclusive content. Use the
keyword in titles, heading, sub heading, body etc.
Use page title, heading and ALT:
Use ALT, TITLE and HEADING attributes wherever you can. They should be meaningful and
descriptive, e.g. European Convention Registration is far better than using only Registration. The
page titles and headings should be breif but descriptive. You will be able to increase your site's
usability level and promotion possibilities if you clearly understand where to put them, when to
use them, and why.
Use ALT for images:
As images are not text, it is important to associate a text with your images. This can be done by
using ALT (alternative text). The search engines read the ALT text, thus making your images
contribute to the search relivance. While uploading images, make sure to include as much
information relevant to the image as possible.
Meta keywords:
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the
page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta
tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google might use them as snippets for
your pages. If no meta data found, google takes the first paragraph or the text on website that
matches the search most appropriatly e.g. http://www.acrplus.org/lg-action has better rank
that lg-action when searching for ‘lg action local’ because it has ‘local’ in its snippet but lg-action
itself doesn’t. Similarly, for iclei-europe.org, the snippet shown is the first paragraph of the
website which is about ‘train of ideas’ which is not what iclei-europe is about.
Meaningful anchor texts:
The text representing a link is reffered to as an anchor. Make sure that anchor text you use
within your own site is useful, descriptive, and relevant. Suitable anchor text makes it easy to
convey the contents linked whereas writing generic anchor text like "page", "article", or "click
here" are not recommended at all.
Promote your website:
The more people see, or hear about your website the more credibility you will have and this
increases your chances of having these visitors come back and possibly become leads. This can
be achieved forexple by Newsletters or by
Build Relationships:
Building relationships with partner or related websites may influence your ranking significantly.
Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up
communication with these sites is usually beneficial.
Use social media sites:
Your project’s pressence on social media sites like facebook, youtube, twitter, flicker, scrib etc.
are a nice and easy way to promote your website and projects to outside world.
Manage files properly: Store files in specialized directories and Instead of having image files
spread out in numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain, consider
consolidating yourimages into a single directory. This simplifies the path to your images.
Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text and avoaid using generic filenames like
"image1.jpg", "pic.gif", "1.jpg" when possible—some sites with thousands of images might
consider automating the naming of images.
Use meaningful URLs:
Instead of www.website/id=5?index.php, whats is better is www.convention2011/hosts/ which
is more descriptive and searchable.
Shorter/faster pages:
Google treate pages that are shorter and faster to load with a better rank.
Updat content regularly:
Add new contents regularly and check for broken links. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
What is not searchable:
Scripts, dynamic pages and content extracted from database will not be crawled.
Comment: make it clear (as Googele states it as well) .. SEO may help but: do not spend time on finding
ways os artificially increase rank but create clean, relevant content !!!!!
Guidelines for webmasters
Sumbit your website to Google: Google adds and updates new sites to their index each time
they crawl the web, and the URL can be submitted at http://www.google.com/addurl/They do
not add all submitted URLs to their index, and they cannot make any predictions or guarantees
about when or if they will appear.
Please enter your full URL, including the http:// prefix. For example: http://www.google.com/.
You may also add comments or keywords that describe the content of your page. These are
used only for googles’s information and do not affect how your page is indexed or used by
Google. Simple-to-understand URLs will convey content information easily
Use consistent domain:
To a spider, www.domain.com/, domain.com/, www.domain.com/index.html and
domain.com/index.html are different urls and, therefore, different pages. Surfers arrive at the
site's home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them as individual urls, and it
makes a difference when working out the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use
for the site's home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a different PageRank, whereas all
of it should have gone to just one url.
Create a sitemap:
There are two sitemaps: one created for the website users on the website and one created for
google. For the users, the sitemap can be simple HTML and for google it has to be XML.
User sitemap: Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your
site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map
into multiple pages.
Google sitemap: Webmaster tools provide a possibility to create sitemaps, to give google an
idea on which pages are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let
google know how you would like the URLs they index to appear. Sitemaps are a way to tell
Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Also a way to tell google
which version of a URL you'd prefer as the canonical one (e.g. http://iclei-europe.org/ or http://
www. iclei-europe.org.com/; more on what's a preferred domain).
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
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Your site has dynamic content.
Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl
process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links
from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to
discover it.)
Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or
are not linked at all.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2008/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2009/</loc>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.brandonsbaseballcards.com/news/2010/</loc>
</url>
</urlset>
Table 1: An example XML sitemap
Robots.txt: Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which
directories can or cannot be crawled. You need a robots.txt file only if your site includes content
that you don't want search engines to index.
Webmaster Tools: Verification on webmaster tools doesn't affect PageRank or affect your site's
performance in Google's search results. It is helpful as long as whats required is to have a site
analysis (what key words people use to reach your site), share information about your site and
tell google about your pages with Sitemaps.
The analysis tools can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform
better in search results. With the service, webmasters can:
301 redirects: Use 301 redirects for any page which are acquiring replacing by new pages
.These redirects are Search engine friendly and they tell the search engines that a page is
permanently moved to another location ,transfer all the association(indexing ,ranking) to the
new page.
Submit to search engine directories: Search engine directories are a good way to get a free link
to your website. They also increase your chances at being listed higher on popular search
engines like Google.
The Open Directory Project is a large public directory managed by Netscape. The ODP is
maintained by a group of volunteer editors from around the world who evaluate sites for
inclusion in the directory. The web pages selected by these editors are organized into a number
of broad categories under which are many more specific subcategories. Google uses this
hierarchy as the basis for its directory.
The Open Directory Project is a web directory of Internet resources. A web directory is
something akin to a huge reference library. The directory is hierarchically arranged by subject from broad to specific. The ODP is maintained by community editors who evaluate sites for
inclusion in the directory. They are our experts, and all submissions are subject to editor
evaluation.
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http://www.google.com/intl/en/dirhelp.html
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
Figure 1: Current status of iclei-europe.org