What Google Thinks Of Your Site?
by Titus Hoskins
How Google views your site does matter if you want to succeed online because Google has become the dominant search engine on the web. It now has over 60% of the U.S. search engine market. In other countries around the world that percentage rises to 80% or more. In addition, the Google Brand Name has solidly permeated the popular psyche and any top rankings within Google will bring much weight and prestige along with all that traffic.
If you're a webmaster, you will already know how vital Google is to the success of your site, especially if you rely upon organic keyword rankings for your traffic. This free organic traffic from Google is highly desired by webmasters because it is extremely targeted and delivers high conversion rates.
In trying to reach the highest rankings possible, I (like most webmasters) have to be constantly aware of what Google thinks of my site and content. As a webmaster and marketer I have always geared my online marketing towards Google. I have spent years building my keyword rankings within Google; if you take out the fact that it has nearly driven me insane, it has mostly been a positive experience.
This experience has also shown me it is indeed important for anyone to know how Google views and rates your site or content. The more knowledge you have, the better able you will be to tackle any obstacles and challenges that will come your way.
SERPs Is The Only Opinion That Counts
And like most webmasters, I try to find out as much about Google as is humanly possible, but Google doesn't give up its secrets easily. In fact, many webmasters would argue the only true opinion Google has of your site is shown in their SERPs - if your keywords/pages are ranked in the number one spots in Google's "Search Engine Results Pages" then Google must think your site or content deserves to be there.
However, there are other ways of finding out how Google is viewing your content. Below are several Google webmaster tools and things you can do to discover just how Google views your site or pages. They will give you a better picture of what Google thinks about your site.
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Checking Your Content/Keywords In Google
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One handy tool that will show you what Google thinks your pages consist of is located here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Just type in your URL and tick off website content and you will get a listing of the major keywords Google has for your content. If your targeted keyword or keywords are not listed, then you have to do some re-writing.
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Checking Your Backlinks In Google
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If you want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google, just open up Google Search and type in:
link:yourURL
and it will show you the number of backlinks you have.
Since Google doesn't give you all your existing backlinks, many webmaster also use Yahoo! to find a more exact number of links your site has on the web.
Just open Yahoo! and type in: linkdomain:yourURL
Now whether Google is using or considering all these backlinks is the big question? Finding the exact number of backlinks you have in Google has always been a problem because Google is not giving you the exact number or at least this is the general opinion of most SEO experts.
Another way I monitor my links in Google is to place quotation marks around my site name or my name "bizwaremagic" or "titus hoskins" and do a search in Google. This gives me the pages containing references to me or my site. This is usually 50,000 to 100,000 pages, I have also noticed my online income usually correlates as this number goes up or down.
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Checking Your Indexed Pages In Google
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Obviously, it is very important for you to know what content the search engines have indexed from your site. You can also check to see how your links are displayed and to see if any titles or descriptions are missing from your pages.
You can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google by using the site command.
Just type into Google Search:
site:yourURL
A little while back, having your pages indexed in Google's Supplemental Index caused webmasters much stress as it seemed Google was judging these pages as "second class" pages. Since then, Google no longer uses the Supplementary Label in grading pages but that doesn't mean a supplementary index doesn't exist; just that Google has promised to crawl and consider these pages as well in any search query.
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Checking Your Google Cache
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You can also check to see the Google Cache of your site by using the cache command. You will also discover when it was last retrieved.
Just type into Google Search:
cache:yourURL
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Checking Your PageRank Within Google
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Another tricky issue is PageRank. This is supposed to be the heart of Google's ranking system created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; each link is considered a "vote" for your page and the higher the number of "votes" you have, the higher the PR your page receives. However, again Google is using "smoke and mirrors" to conceal your true PageRank mainly to cut out abuse and manipulation of their results. Some experts say PageRank still counts, other say it doesn't.
You can check your Google PageRank here:
http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker
From my own experiences, I have received more traffic when my site was at PR4 than I received when it was at PR6. What's important is getting high rankings for your targeted keywords... if you get top spots, it doesn't matter if your main index page (site) is PR4 or PR6, you're still get the same amount of traffic. In other words, don't become too fixated on PageRank because Google in many cases is not letting you see the true PR of a webpage.
I would like to add one point to the whole PageRank issue and that has to do with perception. If you're running an online business then having a PR8 site does matter for it will bring in more business and customers (especially if you're in the SEO industry) mainly because of the "perceived value" of your site or business.
What Google thinks does matter!
In other words, what Google thinks of your site can play a major role in your success. Mainly because, like it or hate it, Google has become the supreme authority on the web and what they say, counts. Therefore, you should always be paying special attention to just what Google is saying about your site and acting upon that knowledge accordingly.
About the Author
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools Everyone is profiting for Google, find out how you can too! Click here: Google Cash File Copyright © 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.
How To Attract More Visitors to Your Website
How To Attract More Visitors to Your Website
by Peter Webber
1. Avoid Flash and frames
Flash content is completely unreadable to search engines, and frames (i.e. pages which are compiled of smaller areas - or 'frames' - to make up one web page) are not normally picked up by them either. It's OK to have smaller, embedded Flash elements within an HTML website, but an entirely Flash site will need a separate HTML version. Individual frame pages that do get picked up by search engines tend to be isolated from the rest of the site, which places them out of context.
2. Don't display wording as graphics only
Page content or wording displayed as graphics cannot be seen by search engines, so it will not be matched against the phrases people are searching for. Nowadays, style sheets allow a good range of text formatting so you don't have to completely sacrifice on style if you choose to use text. If graphics are essential, you should also use ALT tags to provide appropriate descriptive text in addition to the images.
3. Divide and conquer!
Pages dedicated to separate distinct topics or items get a stronger match on search engines than pages that try to cover everything. Try to divide sites up into separate pages (e.g. a different page for each subject, category, product, news item, etc).
4. Put keywords in link text
The text in a hyperlink helps tell search engines what the target page is about. When you link to a page try to use HTML text (as per 2 above) and put some relevant keywords in the link text. This is especially important for your navigation menus.
5. Place popular search terms in the page text
Try to make sure that visible text on each page contains the words and phrases that potential visitors are actually searching for. Do not duplicate phrases unnecessarily, and try to keep it all relevant to the specific subject of that page.
6. Good title tags
The "title" tag is usually what the search engine will display as the link text in the search results - you have around 6 words to clearly state what the page is about.
7. Keywords and Description meta-tags
These meta-tags help provide further supporting content for search engines. The Keywords tag should be a comma-separated list of all the common words and phrases that visitors search for, which can include alternative spellings, misspellings and synonyms. The
Description tag should be a brief sentence or two. If you find yourself having to use hundreds of keywords or long descriptions, then the page probably needs to be divided up as described in point 3.
8. Links in good, links out bad
Links to external sites usually hurt your site rankings, whereas incoming links to your site can help. Try to limit outgoing links and only do link exchanges with sites that rank well. We can advise you on how to assess link exchange partners more accurately.
9. Have a main domain
If the site is accessible via more than one domain name, these may compete with each other for rankings instead of supporting each other. Pick a single main domain to promote and have all others forwarded to it using a '301 Redirect'.
10. No splash pages
Swish animated company logos may do wonders for the boss' ego, but they create an additional link for search engines have to crawl past to reach the relevant content. This can reduce the ranking of the rest of the site pages by as much as 20%, which could mean the difference between being on the first page of results or not.
We hope you found these tips informative and useful.
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