Search Engine Ranking

Search engine ranking is the ranking of a website or web page in the search engine results, for a given keyword phrase

Getting top search engine ranking requires that your site is designed well and is easily spiderable. Designing a search-engine-friendly web site isn't difficult; you just have to keep a few basic concepts in mind.

Search engines like to spider and rank sites that appeal to users. This is the main challenge for search engine developers to create algorithms that will favor user-friendly web sites while casting aside sites that are created mainly for spiders. This means that the rule of search engine friendly design is the same as the rule for web design in general: Make it user-friendly!

There are a few important things you should do in order to improve your search engine ranking:
•    Your title tag should have keywords that meaningfully describe your page. Note that this "title" refers to the one in the ‘head’ section of your document, not the one displayed in your browser window.

•    The description meta tag may also influence the ranking of your page for specific search terms. This means, presumably, that if someone searches for a particular keyword, and it appears in your description and title tags, Google will accord that page a higher rank.

•    Keyword density is important to Google. This probably means that if someone searches for "search engine ranking" and your page has many instances of those three words in sequence, your page is considered more relevant than another page with those three individual words scattered all over the page.

•    Words in the keyword meta tag have the same value as the other words on the web page itself, except for one very important case: if your meta keyword tag contains keywords that do not occur in your main web page, your page will be penalized. Your search engine ranking may improve if you use both the title tag and relevant meta tag.

•    Avoid keywords stuffing, extremely small text, hidden text, etc. Google considers these to be spammy techniques.

•    Stay away from duplicate content: this includes mirrors of your site as well as identical content appearing from different domain names.
Remember, search engine users generally only explore the first 20 sites in the search results. If you site isn't in the top 20, you won't be found, it's as simple as that. You should always include search engine optimization in your marketing budget to make your site as effective as a billboard on a street. So what are you waiting for? Select the best SEO services available, and start the journey towards higher search engine ranking NOW!

Google Sitemaps

There is no denying that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines. A fairly decent page ranking in Google is worth so much more than a better showing in other less prominent search engines. The reason for this is the overwhelming popularity of Google. A vast majority of internet users use Google’s services in looking for quality content on the internet. With the large number of people using it, a high page rank acts a great advertising opportunity for your website.

Because of the astounding amount of websites that submit their web pages to Google, the think tanks at Google decided to come out with Google Sitemaps. This service, which was started in June 2005, makes web page submissions to Google much easier but with the added bonus of getting detailed reports regarding the submitted page’s visibility in Google. With Google Sitemaps webmasters can continually inform Google about their web pages as well as any changes that they make to help improve their standing in Google. This program serves as complementary service to Google’s regular crawl, although it is considered that using Google Sitemaps can do a better job than the regular crawl.

Google decided to come out with the Google Sitemaps program as a way for the search engine to offer better search results to its users. With the current limitations of web crawling, usually not all pages are discovered. It is also difficult to determine if a page has changed. With so many uncontrollable variables, crawlers sometimes just make guesses. With Google Sitemaps it becomes easier to get a better picture of all the possible URLs in a website as well as the frequency of the changes that are made. Knowing these variables makes searching in Google a more robust and fruitful experience because users are assured that they always get a fresh index of web pages.

To take advantage of the Google Sitemap program, webmasters only need to download a free open-source tool called Sitemap Generator that helps in creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap protocol. Google hopes that webservers will eventually support the protocol so that webmasters will not take any other extra steps to in order to join the program.

Google Sitemaps also freely accepts codes taken from or generated by third party providers and even lists down all of the available third party software within the Google Sitemap pages.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such provider that provides a free Google sitemaps generator for webmasters which will also produce a HTML site map.

Google’s software and service developers are continually tweaking and improving the Google Sitemap program to better address the needs of webmasters. Because of this, new features are continually added to the Sitemap program.

Some of the new features that have been incorporated now revolve around the reporting aspect of Google Sitemap.

When a site has been verified, Google can show webmasters the statistics and errors about the website as well as the web pages. Among the information that would be included are:

* The URLs that Google had trouble crawling including the reason why. Also included are the top queries that resulted in returns from their websites as well as those that brought traffic to their sites.

* The web page’s PageRank distribution

* The common text in external anchors that other websites used to link to their websites.

These new features, as well as others that are still being developed, brings tremendous advantages for webmasters because it makes the task of running a website so much easier. It also simplifies certain tasks that webmasters need to do to better manage their website’s page ranking. Ultimately, it gives their websites better exposure as well as the inclusion of more of their web pages in Google’s index.

Google Sitemaps useful SEO Tools

One of the most useful utilities that the engineers and think tank at Google have ever devised is the Google Sitemaps program.

The said program, which is a product of their much publicized and much vaunted policy of allowing its engineers to spend 20 per cent of their paid time on personal projects, has been a boon to many webmasters, website operators and SEO professionals because it has made certain aspects of their work far easier and more intuitive.

Google’s decision to come out with Google Sitemaps is based mainly on the desire to present more intuitive and better search results to users. Because of the current limitations presented by web crawling, there is a high probability that not all pages in a website will be noted and registered with the search engine. There are also many variables and factors that are not addressed with the current methods and technologies used for website submissions. These limitations are what Google Sitemaps seeks to address.

Google Sitemaps was officially started in June 2005. This handy utility makes the submission of web pages to Google easier. The added features though are the detailed reports that is also generated by Google Sitemaps. In order to use the Google Sitemaps program, a person need only download a free open source tool called Sitemap Generator or use one of the many 3rd party applications. These utilities are what helps in creating a sitemap of the webmaster’s website using the Sitemap protocol that is being backed by Google itself.

The complement of new features that are part of the Google Sitemaps programs also means that it has become a great tool for search engine optimization professionals. The automation of these features has made it easier for SEO professionals to do their job and formulate the proper strategies to increase the page ranking of a website.

For example the “top search queries” feature of Google Sitemaps allows you to see the top search queries that not only returned the client website as a result as well as those that Google searchers actually clicked on. This feature also allows you to see the top position for the website in the search results generated for either set search queries. The positions indicated are an average of the movement for the last three weeks.

Since any type of error can have a detrimental effect not only on the functionality of the website but with the page ranking of a website in Google, the report function of Google Sitemaps is a big help to SEO professionals. With the new feature, a webmaster or SEO professionals can download information straight from the Sitemaps account into a comma separated value (CSV) file. This file, which can be accessed through any text editor or spreadsheet software can contain the specific details of the website, including the errors generated (via dead links, broken links, etc) or statistics. The good thing is the file can even contain the information for all of the websites operated by SEO professional and included in the Sitemaps account. This is monumentally beneficial because it fully automates the search for any dead or broken links that may otherwise be a tedious chore if done manually. The good thing here is that this is periodically updated so you will know if the changes incorporated into the website will produce broken links.