Hawkfield: web development & web design

Your partner in IT - Gent Belgium

Get a better ranking on Google

First of all, there is no such thing as the best way to get a top ranking on Google. However, there are some things you can take into account when designing and developing a new website.

Google has various ways of ranking sites. First of all, you need to know about PageRank (or PR). Every page in the google database has a PR rating (from 0 to 10), the higher the better. You get PR when other pages link to yours. The formula used is not very complicated, but explaining it is not really that important. All you need to know is that pages give a part of there PR as a vote, divided among the pages it links to.
That way, it is better to get a link from a page with a high PR than it is from a page with a low PR. But you should also remember the amount of links on that page. A link from a page with PR 4 and just your link might be better than a page with PR 5 and 99 other links.
But basicly, the more links, the better. When checking for links ( search for link:www.yourdomain.com/yourpage.html ) you have to remember that Google only shows pages with a PR > 4 in that type of query. That doesnt mean that pages with PR < 4 don't count, they surely do.
The Google toolbar has a feature where it shows the PR of the page you are looking at. This is extremely helpful if you want any feedback on how your site is doing.

Besides the PR of a site, Google also checks the keywords in your page. The more related Google finds your page to be, the higher you will be ranked. Keywords are not only the META tags, they are actually of small significance to Google. Alot more important are the words you use on the page itself (the normal text any visitor reads), the keywords in your domain (ex. shopping-christmas.com has 2 keywords in the domain), the keywords you use when giving alternative text to the images on your site () and even the keywords other people use to link to your site (ex. having a link with the words "Christmas shopping" instead of "Click here" is much more valuable).

What you cannot do, and this is very important, is spam Google. Ways of spaming are palcing keywords on your pages with the same color as the background. A spider (like Google) would see them, but regular visitors won't. At first this might look like a good way to improve your ranking, but it is not. Google actively bans sites placing invisible text on there pages. Wheter it is text with the same color as the background, or text in hidden layers. The basic rule is, when your visitors get to see something other than the Google spider, you are in violation of the Google terms of service. When you get reported Google may ban you.