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Google Ranking Tips
(continued)

Google considers keyword density in the body of a page for determining relevancy too, so make sure your keywords and phrases appear a couple of times throughout the whole page. Don't go overboard though, a density of 6-10% seems to work best.

Google has recently been noticed to give a substantial amount of "weight" to words appearing between the various header tags. These are tags designed to help you split up sections of your page, so this approach by Google seems to make sense. The header tags go from <h6> the smallest to <h1> the biggest, the bigger the heading tag the more relevent your page will become for the words within it. It is for this reason that you should always try to have your most important words within these tags as often as possible throughout your page.

Other advice about making your page relevant would be to make as many keywords appear within bold <b> tags as you can. In the past Google has been known to index text in alt image tags, whether they still do or not I don't know but it couldn't hurt to include keywords in these tags anyway.

One final tip on page relevancy is the point on having your keywords and phrases in links which point to your site. It's a good idea to have the linking text contain your keywords as Google even says itself in its description of its Pagerank technology that it analyzes pages that links come from.

How much keyword laden links matter is anyone's guess. I have however noticed a lot of sites which give the HTML code to visitors who want to exchange links do include keywords in the actual linking area. You should do this too on your links page, say something like "if you want to link to this site, please use the following code". The code would of course have your most important words in the actual link text and your less important words in the accompanying description of your site.


Google Pagerank

In the above section of the article you've learned what areas Google uses and looks at when looking for a relevant site, but what method does Google use to determine which site is better, the answer is the Pagerank system.

Pagerank is as the name suggests a ranking system of pages. It works on the basis that if a website ABC.COM has been linked from a website XYZ.COM, abc.com must have some good content and therefore Google will count the link from XYZ.COM as a vote for ABC.COM. You can check your Pagerank on Google by downloading the Google toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com

The Pagerank™ scale goes from 1 to 10 on the Google toolbar and from 1 to 7 beside listings in the Google directory. A less important site is of course a site with a PR of 1 and a very very important site is a site with a PR of 7 or 10, in the directory or toolbar respectively.

The more links or votes a site has the more important it must be and therefore the higher it will rank for search words which it is relevant to, right?, WRONG!.

Google does not simply count the number of incoming links a page has, if that was the case every webmaster from Iceland to Vietnam would try and exchange links to every Tom, Dick and Harry website that would let them. In Googles own words:

"Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
 

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