[Cialug] Google Rankings

[Morris Dovey]

Dave J. Hala Jr. wrote:
> I'm finishing up a re-work of my website.  I'd like it to show
> higher in the google page rankings.
> 
> My understanding is that a site with a higher number of links
> to other sites will get a higher ranking.  I also saw some
> pages that had a <META> tag embedded with a bunch of key
> words. Will making improvements in these areas help?
> 
> Any other ideas, other than paying google?

Dave...

I'm not even close to being an expert here; but AFAICT the 
meta/keyword option doesn't help much. I've done a daily analysis 
of my web site hits for the past year and fairly closely 
monitored spider vs browser activity.

What's seemed to help the most has been addition of pages that 
provided info that lots of people seemed to want - that have 
absolutely nothing to do with the site's business purpose. I 
don't understand the /how/ of the process; but as these only 
peripherally related pages got more hits, the other pages rose in 
the search engine rankings. Could it be that hits anywhere in the 
domain enhance the rankings of all pages?

For example, I added a page of resources for C programmers at 
http://www.iedu.com/c/ which turned out to be (apparently) useful 
to a lot of people. As the number of hits on those links climbed, 
so did the ranking of my solar collector business pages. I added 
some woodworking how-to pages at 
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/interest.html with a lot of photos 
that turned out to be fairly popular and, again, the business 
pages moved up the rankings.

I don't know if there are links elsewhere to these pages (there 
probably are at least some) but this may be a part of the reason.

It did seem to make /some/ difference when I added distinctive 
favicon.ico files for each of the major sections of the web site 
- go figure...

And I haven't paid (or even had any contact with) Google.

Hope this helps at least a little bit. I'd appreciate hearing 
about any experiences you have.

-- 
Morris Dovey
West Des Moines, Iowa USA