Does anyone know what I should be looking for to get a website ranked in Google?

Question

Have a small site and people keep emailing me about search engine optimisation. Its not something I understand that well if anyone can help on some basic things to do I'd be grateful.

Answer 1

Search engine optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical search engines involving areas such as local search. Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.

In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Creating web pages with SEO in mind does not necessarily mean creating content more favorable to algorithms than human visitors. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.

Search engine optimizers often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

Google brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been important to the Google algorithm from the start. PageRank is an algorithm that weights a page's importance based upon the quantity and quality of incoming links. PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are more valuable than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

The PageRank algorithm proved very effective, and Google began to be perceived as serving the most relevant search results. On the back of strong word of mouth from programmers, Google became a popular search engine. Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered as well as on-page factors to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines focusing primarily upon on-page factors for their rankings.

SEOs widely agree that the signals that influence a page's rankings include:

Keywords in the title tag.
Keywords in links pointing to the page.
Keywords appearing in visible text.
Link popularity.
PageRank of the page (for Google).
Keywords in Heading Tag H1,H2 and H3 Tags in webpage.
Linking from one page to inner pages.
Placing punch line at the top of page.

Answer 2

Don't listen to the keywords advice a guy just gave you. Major search engines (Goolge, Yahoo, Bing) don't use meta keywords. If your new CMS changes your internal link structure you might get better or worse rankings. If the structure remains the same your ranking positions are probably not going to be effected at all. Also note that CMS might change some other ranking factors on your website such as page titles, H tags, image alt tags and similar. If you wish to create a really on-site SEO friendly website, Joomla would not be my first choice. If you need a light site that will do fine in terms of on-site SEO, go with WordPress.

Answer 3

Google rankings are based on how many other pages link to yours. Don't really have any advice on how to bring that about though.

Answer 4

Hi!

Use links, from known pages to yours...

Good luck!

Answer 5

There's a guy from Ayrshire, Colin Boyd is his name he know's what to do