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HOWTO: make a website that ranks high on Google?

sk3pt1c

sk3pt1c

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 29, 2005
918
6
a simulacrum
i've been hearing this a lot lately as a request from clients and i was wondering if there's something i don't know here...
as far as i know what you can do to start ranking high is to build a clean, search engine friendly website, use CSS for the presentational stuff, use descriptive URLs and so on and submit your URL to Google...
other than that it's all up to the person that owns the site to actually promote it via email, business cards and what not to increase the traffic to it...
and perhaps add an AdWords service to it...

am i missing some super cool method to make sure a site ranks super high at search engines?
 
Yea, content is very important. It means nothing for someone to show up at a site if they have no reason to stay. This will help in that other sites will naturally want to link to something on the site and that builds up ranking.

Good semantic HTML is of help. Knowing the keywords that are appropriate for the site and are present on the site (in the content), not the meta tag for keywords.
 
THere are people who make money trying to tell others how to get their site ranked high by Google but really all they can do is prevent your site from ranking very low.

To be on that first page you need to get others to link to your site. People link to sites they like and that they think others will like. And no, making fake web pages that link to your real site does not work. Goggle caught on to that trick years ago. The best way is to look at other sites that try and do what yours does and try to be better than them.

Basically the best stuff floats to the top.

You can try and "game" the system but Google hires many engineers who work every day to improve their system so that it can't be "gamed". Google's entire empire depends on their search engine putting the best stuff at the top.
 
You need to visualize the web as websites connected by tubes. You have a certain amount of "juice" (representing pagerank). When someone links to you, a certain part of that juice is sent to your website. Every internal link in your websites adds tubes between your pages so the juice spreads across your website.

This means that to make your pages all rank well, you need lots of links from external websites, but you need to distribute that pagerank effectively across your website to get maximal results.

If you get a link from a page that talks about motorcycles, but your website talks about web development, google sees that and gives less value to the link.

And how do you get all those relevant external links?

The best was is not by asking people to link to you. It's not by exchanging links either.

The best way is to have unique and valuable content that people WANT to link to without even knowing you.

If you have an article that many people will want to link to in their blog, it helps allot.

Another way of gaining lots of links is by offering a downloadable product from one of your pages that is valuable enough for people to link to. Make sure people can't hotlink the file and they will need to get to your page first.

There are lots of ways to get a high pagerank to rank high on the SEs but the best way is just to write interesting content and not try all they "tricks" you read on Adwords advertisement.

Here are a few technical tricks:

-Have an external CSS file so google sees primarily content in your HTML,
-Have lots of links between your pages and don't have pages that take 3-4 clicks to get there,
-Use CSS to get your most important content at the top of your code,
-Avoid javascript links and redirects,
-Write code that validates (Not sure about that but it can't hurt),
-The <title> tag is very important, try to have your primary keywords in it,
-Don't do links that say "click here" because your linked page isn't called "click here". ex: If you have a page about pandas, do a link like this: The pandas are great animals. NOT: Click here to see the panda page.
-Search for the term SEO on google to find anything else. This is a bigger subject than most think.

Good luck with your SEO.
 
yeah, i've read about SEO and what it boils down to is what you've all said, clean content that is to the point, links and basically common sense and a sense of who the site is for so that the content is appropriately tailored to the visitors...
it pisses me off people actually make money out of SEO, it's just common sense really, isn't it?
anywho, thanks for all the input people, once more it makes me proud to be a mac owner and member of this kick@ss forum! :)
 
TodVader said:
Don't do links that say "click here" because your linked page isn't called "click here". ex: If you have a page about pandas, do a link like this: The pandas are great animals. NOT: Click here to see the panda page.
Click to expand...

This is one I always like, not only does it help SEO, but also helps visitors as well. I try to practice this when I post links in threads. I hate when people link the word "this" as it's generally unhelpful.

sk3pt1c said:
it's just common sense really, isn't it?
Click to expand...

If it was, there wouldn't be so many resources to learn about it. It is a little more common sense for people have been in the business though, but for the business owner who simply wants a web site, the SEO stuff goes over their head and all they want is more traffic.
 
Make sure people can't hotlink the file and they will need to get to your page first.
Click to expand...
What is hotlinking? How can you prevent others from doing this?

I am planning to use a javascript/ ajax as a slideshow! It's a slideshow and looks really cool, was really hoping not to get rid of this. I imagine it is because it links away from your site? How harmful is it?

Also been hearing a lot of negativity towards Meta Tags, why is this? I thought they would be great and was thinking of placing about a hundred of them in my site lol. Now I'm hearing that a lot of search engines do not even use them.
 
Dal123 said:
What is hotlinking? How can you prevent others from doing this?

I am planning to use a javascript/ ajax as a slideshow! It's a slideshow and looks really cool, was really hoping not to get rid of this. I imagine it is because it links away from your site? How harmful is it?

Also been hearing a lot of negativity towards Meta Tags, why is this? I thought they would be great and was thinking of placing about a hundred of them in my site lol. Now I'm hearing that a lot of search engines do not even use them.
Click to expand...

An example of hot linking is someone using an image tag that points to an image on your web server, but the person viewing that web site never visits your site. Your bandwidth gets used to show something on someone else's web site. It's not always bad, like when people posts images in a post in a forum that's hosted on another site.

If I remember correctly you're using a Google API for your slideshow and your images are hosted somewhere on their server. In this case, you are actually hot linking so there's no reason to block hot linking on your site. Stopping it though for other images isn't too difficult. I use some Apache skills to send an alternative image instead (one that says thief).

As for meta tags, there's a variety of them and some are important, such as the one for character set. The description one is still good and search engines view it, but the keywords one is not so much as too many people abused it, and it sounds like you were planning on being one of those abusers.
 
"Thief" very clever, I like it! Would it not be better for you if you posted your logo here or a link to YOUR website. That would really rub their face in it lol.:D

Yes I was planning to do everything in my power to get my website ranked highly, and trying to get my own construction business running.:rolleyes:
 
Dal123 said:
"Thief" very clever, I like it! Would it not be better for you if you posted your logo here or a link to YOUR website. That would really rub their face in it lol.:D
Click to expand...

I was trying to minimize the file size so as not to waste bandwidth so used a 2-color image that's only about 131 bytes. I've only had two people hot-link my images. One guy was using it on his MySpace page, and another guy was claiming my artwork was his own, that's what irked me and made me start blocking hot links.

Can't do a link as it has to use the same mime type, in this case an image.
 
I understand.
So can we see some of your previous work. Would be nice to see some of your sites as we have had a few chats on here?
 
Dal123 said:
I understand.
So can we see some of your previous work. Would be nice to see some of your sites as we have had a few chats on here?
Click to expand...

There's a link in my profile (or if you click on my display name) if you want to take a look. I don't have a ton on there. My site is just my sandbox to try things out really.
 
To prevent hot linking, I use a htaccess file. If someone wants anything .jpg, I check if the "asker" is from my domain. If it is, I serve the image. If it isn't, I serve a usual "theif" image.

I don't do it on every website but sometimes you need it. I use it more for .zip files than images but it's the same thing programming wize.
 
sk3pt1c said:
yeah, i've read about SEO and what it boils down to is what you've all said, clean content that is to the point, links and basically common sense and a sense of who the site is for so that the content is appropriately tailored to the visitors...
it pisses me off people actually make money out of SEO, it's just common sense really, isn't it?
anywho, thanks for all the input people, once more it makes me proud to be a mac owner and member of this kick@ss forum! :)
Click to expand...


SEO is a constantly changing profession.....just as google constantly changes the rules....

a small thing, but one of many: your style sheet should use the standard H2 as opposed to a header name that you make up (pagetitle). You can change the H2 characteristics, but google simple looks for H2 when its looking at a website and that goes into its ranking system.
 
As already mentioned, SEO is a rather large topic and backlinks are a large key to it. The more [better ranking] sites that link to your site, the better. Depending on your site topic you also want to target specific keywords that you want to target. If your site is about selling cookies for instance, you'd want people to find your site from searching "cookies", or better yet, something more specific as it will have less competition and therefore make your new site have a fighting chance amongst the other quadrillion out there. To target your keyword you want to have a "keyword density" (aka the word or phrase showing up on your site/page/article) of 3-6%. There are many techniques out there for SEO. Actually I just started on a blog with guides on internet marketing and SEO...all free. If you want more info let me know.
 
I use some Apache skills to send an alternative image instead (one that says thief).
Click to expand...

So how do you do this? I'm going to have a lot of images on my site displayed through some sort of lightbox viewer. Will it be possible to prevent HOTLINKING? If so how do you write the code? I imagine it's only a few lines?:D
 
So, will the search engine look at only your homepage for the relevant content, or will it search the entire site? Be very hard to fit lots of relevant content into your homepage :eek:.
 
spam aka "SEO"
Click to expand...
What ? How can you compare Search Engine Optimization to SPAM? People are looking for something in particular, they are not being bombarded with information they don't want involuntarily. They are looking for it and most relevant topics displayed! If anything it is the opposite of spam.
 
Dal123 said:
So, will the search engine look at only your homepage for the relevant content, or will it search the entire site? Be very hard to fit lots of relevant content into your homepage :eek:.
Click to expand...

Search engines look at all pages they can. Just think about when you use Google, does it only give you home pages? Nope. It's smart enough to check each page individually for key terms for SEO type information. The home page is usually the most important though since it's the most linked to for your site, though it's not always the case.
 
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