My Page Rank with Google is 0/10!

lauraaurora

I have just created a new website, and I made sure I included lots of meta tags to start off, intending to add more shortly.
The site is still under construction, but I have a basic layout.
It's only been up and running since the 13th, so I know I might have to wait a bit to appear on Google, however;

I've had a basic look at Google positioning. I don't understand what they mean by 'links' pointing to my page... Do they literally mean I have to ask other websites to put links on their sites linking to my site?! I hope I'm misunderstanding it.
I also see that Google don't look at my meta tags anyway, is this right?
I'm trying to keep my site really small and simple, I don't want loads of text... any idea of what the solution is?

albertross_2

If you do a google for search engine optimisation/optimization, there are lots of sites on the subject. But yes you are right, the more sites that link to your site, the better. The actual ranking algorithm used is a closely guarded secret for obvious reasons (ranking is worth ££). The problem with meta tags, is that everyone uses them to try and boost their ranking, so search engines nowadays ignore them. Getting your page in the top 100 is difficult.

Presumably you've done this:

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Bob63

Google sitemaps are a cool way of getting the Googlebots interested in your page and keeping up to date with any changes you make.

Check out http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and look at sitemaps. There are some tools available to generate your sitemap for free, however if your site is pretty simple i.e. with only a few pages, then the sitemap file is very easy to generate by hand.

For an example, I keep an up to date sitemap of my charity's website - http://www.freewheelers.org.uk
The sitemap is http://www.freewheelers.org.uk/sitemap.xml

Once you have created the sitemap you then need to tell Google about it and prove that you own the site by creating a special file in your webspace - all pretty straightforward. Once you are up and running you get some nice reports about your site including keywords, search hits etc.

My main page ranks 2/10 but the links page ranks 4/10. Different pages within your site will have different rankings.

Mike

save-a-lot

Hi

Loads of inbound links is the key, try submitting to directories first off - here is a list List of directories - these are both paid for inclusion and free.

When a website is brand new with Google it enters a limbo called the sandbox, look this up on google, there is plenty of forum discussion about this. Basically, PR will not be awarded to brand new sites.

With regard to SEO try this approach (this is a copy/paste from one of my posts on another forum)

1]
The first page of a site is the most important from a search engine point of view - the text on your "index.htm" page should total about 250 words. Into this 250 words pick a keyphrase that people are likely to search on, for the instance of my site I use "online shopping directory". I use this phrase six times (these terms can also be used in hyperlinks). Also, in the instance of my site the repetition of "UK" is used. It is important to incorporate these keywords into the site for search engines to rank it.

Note: I have used heading tags <h1></h1> at the top of the page with the text 'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory... No.1 Shopping Online' - this indicates to a search engine spider the start of the content and includes the keyphrase.

So what have I done here?
The repetition of keyphrases has made a positive indication to a search engine that this page is to do with an online shopping directory, the repetition reinforces that.

2]
The page title (meta title) - I never use more than ten words, there is little worth writing more... I repeat the 'UK Online Shopping Directory' keyphrase here, that I mentioned in point 1. On pages further into the site I use different titles that are relevant to the page category or the product I am selling.

3]
Keywords:
Ideally each page should have different keywords but their importance has diminished considerably as search engines tend to look moreso at content rather than the keywords tag - so I don't go to too much trouble. If you do only use a maximum of 25 keywords, it is not worth typing more as a spider will not pick all of them up after a certain threshold limit. (I think)

Also, no word should be used more than three times, otherwise the effectiveness of your keywords may be diluted.

4]
Description:
Ideally each page should have different description but again the importance of the description tag has diminished considerably and it is not worth going to much trouble. Limit your descriptions to around 25 words.

5]
CSS: Always place CSS in an external file and call it in i.e.
<LINK
href="http://www.website.com/css.css&quot; type=text/css
rel=stylesheet>

- if there is lots of CSS style sheet code on your site, this will cause search engines to perceive relevant text as being much further down the page, and therefore less important than it actually is.

6]
Images:
always make use of the alt attribute and give images a keyword specifiic name, i.e. if you have an image of a villa in spain call the image villa_in_spain.jpg

see the full tag below...

<img src="images/villa_in_spain.jpg" alt="Villa in Spain" border="0">

make sure that your images are also optimised for the web, i.e. images saved "for the web" via photoshop etc.

7]
Getting Reciprocal Links:

Then, when requesting reciprocal links stay completely relevant to your own subject area (and I tend to stay Country specific aswell - since I run a UK Directory).

Whilst images as reciprocal links look nice, they are not as powerful as keyworded text links - I request from other webmasters to have:

'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory' - (or variations of this)

as it strengthens the view that search engines will have of my page(s) - i.e. lots of incoming links saying the page is to do with shopping in the UK... compounding this is the keyword density of the phrases on the homepage that are saying the same thing. It is this combination that will make your search engine positioning move up the rankings.

All the Best, and I hope this is helpful

lauraaurora

Thanks guys, it's so much easier when it's explained in proper English that I can actually understand!!
Thanks x

save-a-lot

Hi

To create an XML site map for Google download this software

http://gsitecrawler.com/

it crawls your whole site and produces a google sitemap.

Then, goto https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login and sign up, then go through the submission process.

lauraaurora

Thanks, I found another site last night that did that for me, so now I'm all sitemapped up! I've followed all of the major suggestions, so just waiting to be crawled
Thanks again all.

niccy

hi, just a question

does the fact that your site is a .com or co.uk make any difference to rankings,
for instance would a search for say Glasgow always have Glasgow.com as number one

thanks for any answers

martindow

Is your site indexed at all yet? In google put in site:yoursiteurl like this
site:https://www.moneysavingexpert.com
and google will list all of the pages from your site that it has indexed. If it has not got into the index it won't have page rank. Personally I would not get too hung up on page rank - what is more important is getting well listed for keywords when people are searching.

I agree with a lot that has been said but be careful getting inbound links. Links to your site from dubious link farms will certainly do no good. Time also seems to be a factor with google - sites that have been around for several years seem to be favoured on the basis that they must be reliable if they are still around.

I think the most important thing is to have your pages optimised for keyword strings that you think people are likely to search for. These words should be in the page title, the headings h1, etc and mentioned several times in the text on the page. It does seem that making good pages for the visitor can also be good for google listings.

If you would like to post the url of your site I'm sure that people here would be happy to give advice and constructive comments.