1. Pick some keywords you want to raise your ranking for (e.g., "Sport Shoes"). Make damn sure your website's text contains these keywords!
2. It's good if the domain name for your website contains these keywords (e.g., "http://www.mikes-sportshoes-shop.com/").
3. Having the full URL include your chosen keywords is also helpful (e.g., "http://www.mikes-sportshoes-shop.com/sportshoes.html").
4. Google also likes it if your website's title contains the keywords, e.g.: "Mike's Shop – Sport Shoes for Sale"
5. What Google doesn't like very much is the keywords meta-tag. If you still want to use it, don't include more than 7 keywords, and make sure they all appear on the very same website that uses the keywords meta- tag in readable text form.

2. The Google Pagerank feature

If you have ever been using the Google Toolbar, you also probably will have noticed Google's "PageRank"-Feature:
(image)

In short, PageRank is a keyword-independent ranking method based on:

1. how many pages contain links to your website (more = better),
2. the PageRank of these pages (higher = better),
3. the amount of links on these pages (little = better), and
4. the amount of external links on your website (fewer = better).

So, obviously you want many websites linking to your website, not only for visitors to follow these links, but mainly to push your position on Google.

For getting started, you will from now on leave a link to your website everywhere you surf where it's possible. You're using some web forums? Include a link to your website in your signature. You're reading blogs? Just leave some tiny feedback alongside your website URL for every article you read. Convince some friends/family members/co-workers to do you a favor and do so for you, too.

For this purpose, we'll now focus on link exchange, which works as follows: you'll place links to other websites who will in exchange place a link to your website on their websites. (It's usually easy to find partners for link exchange, for instance you could just write emails to webmasters of related websites proposing a link exchange. Please do so.)

Now, if you've been following my explanations, you will have wondered if this is going to work at all, since not only do links to your website increase your pagerank, but also do backlinks to other pages decrease it. That is right, but - I've got a dirty and highly effective trick for you that comes in very handy in this special scenario:

3. Setting external Hyperlinks without suffering from PageRank loss

You'll do this by adding the new attribute rel to your outgoing links and setting it to nofollow.

For example, change:
<a href="http://www.linkexchangepartner.com/">click</a>
into
<a href="http://www.linkexchangepartner.com/" rel="nofollow">click</a>
This will make the links invisible for search engine spiders, so Google will not decrease your PageRank! Just remember to not set rel to nofollow whenever you are linking to your own websites.

4. Checking your link popularity

As you are making progress in spreading your links, you want to check if the popular search engines are already aware of them.

1. For Google, all you need to do is searching the web with Google for "link:www.yourdomain.com". The number of the results is equal to the number of pages that are already linking to you and are also indexed by Google's spider.
2. For more search engines, more sophisticated results and a comparison chart, you should use "Marketleap's Link Popularity Checker" which is free and doesn't require registration. This one also enables you to see your Google position for given keywords.

5. Better search results for a given keyword

At this point, you already know how to increase your PageRank and thereby your Google position in general, and you hopefully are already following my suggestions.

You already have chosen some keywords – now I will show you how to associate you website with them so search engines will find your page when searching for these specific keywords, and place your link on top of the competition. I assume you already followed all general hints (1). Follow these, too, and you'll soon notice a visitor increase from people searching Google for your keywords!

1. Whenever you set a link to your website, if possible, make the link text contain your keywords! Example:
   <a href="http://www.mikes-sportshoes-shop.com/">for Sale: Sport Shoes</a>
2. When you're not using a link text but a banner, logo or image, you should set the images alt attribute to contain your keywords. This text will also be shown in case the image cannot be loaded.
   <a href="http://www.mikes-sportshoes-shop.com/"> <img src="sportshoebanner.png" alt="Sport Shoes for Sale"> </a>
3. You can also use the links title attribute for this purpose, which is very flexible.
   <a href="http://www.mikes-sportshoes-shop.com/" title="for Sale: Sport Shoes">Mike's Shop</a>

Feel free to combine these methods.

6. Update regularly

After you upload a page to the Internet, it takes a while (usually up to 3-4 weeks) before search engine spiders notice it is there, or re-spider it to update the search engine's database. But since there are many websites who have important content that is changing fast (CNN.com is a pretty obvious example), these sites are being spidered far more often to increase the search engine result quality.

Thus, if you update your website regularly, it will more often be spidered. Not only will this help search engine results to be more up to date - many search engines do prefer more up-to-date websites in their search results. ("No update a day keeps the visitors away". Or - whatever, just remember to update!)

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