What this lesson is about.
Page rank. What is it? How do I increase mine?
Page rank is googles way to determine how "relevant" your page is compared to others for any given search term. The reason for this is to give their users the most relevant page at the top of the list. Its what makes google good at search. What google classes as "relevent" includes many aspects (important / popularity / most visited / liked / trusted etc)
Image by Felipe Micaroni Lalli (micaroni@gmail.com).
Increasing your page rank is often referred to as SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the science and art of making your website or page become higher on googles page rank and therefor appear closer to the top when somebody searches for you.
Some ways to increase your page ranking and search-ability
- Unique tags or handles - These are the search terms people use to find your page. You want this to be unique enough that the search term does not bring up 2million results. This will make your job of getting to the top of the list very difficult. But also as short and relevant as possible. Once you figure out what your unique "tag" is want to use that everywhere you can. The tag I want to use for people to find me is Product Designer Luke Ritchie if you google this term you get 24,000 results which makes getting to the top of the list easier than the search term "Luke Ritchie" which has 1,200,000 results. You will notice I used this tag in the blog post title. Also I linked the words about to my linkedin profile creating an outward link to a high ranking website with my information on it. This increases the chances of people finding me.
- Outward links going towards popular and relevant sites. The more popular and relevant the sites you link to the more it makes your page appear to be reputable. This helps it rank higher as google believes its relevant and people would want to go to your site.
- Backlinks - This is links that go from the web back to your website. These are like votes for your website. The links are also weighted depending where they originated. The more popular or trusted the source of the links the bigger the vote they cast.
- Keeping people at your site longer. This makes google think your site is cooler or more relevant as people want to hang out there so it must be better than a site people only spend a few seconds at and don't come back.
Work sheet for this lesson.
- What is your unique tag? Is it too long or too common? How many search results are there for your tag?
- Create outward links to high ranking or relevant websites. Example http://en.wikipedia.org (high ranking) or other design blogs (relevant)
- Create outward links to other websites that contain information about you. Such as linkedin.com
- Create backlinks pointing to your website. The simplest method for this is to use the social networking buttons on the bottom of each post, these create links back to your page from other locations. Such as twitter, facebook etc.
- Get more followers. Ask people you know to follow you. This is the simple way but you only know so many people. The goal should be to create a site cool enough that strangers will want to follow you. Other ways to get more followers are to follow other blogs which are relevant and you think are cool, the owners might be nice enough to return the favor. Leaving useful interesting and relevant comments on blogs is another good way to drive traffic to your site. If people are interested in your comment they can click your profile and visit your site.
- Think ways to make users of your site want to stay longer.
How do I check my progress?
- The ultimate test is to search your unique "tag" on google.com Don't get discoraged yet though it will take more time and work to get to the first page result.
- Use the Stats tab in blogger to check traffic to your blog, don't check it obsessively though, you only need to look once a week to see if the trend is upwards.
Enjoy and have fun with it!
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