Eight No-Cost Tips to Juice Up Your Page Rank

Eight No-Cost Tips To Juice Up Your Page Rank Page rank is everything. Everything! If your site is buried on page 56 of Google's SERPs (search engine results pages) you aren't going to get a lot of foot traffic, even if you're selling the best chocolates in the world at the lowest prices. If your PR isn't up to snuff, you're not going to sell enough. End of story. But how do you increase your PR without spending a bundle? Well, here are some low and no-cost tips to get your site moving in the right direction. Tip #1 Drop the SEO Text The days of SEO text are soooo last millennium. The rules have changed. You can't simply pack every pixel with keywords and expect to show up on page uno of Google's SERPs. Lose the keyword density formulas and everything you ever knew about keyword density. Yes, placement of keywords in headers "above the fold" on the homepage will help, but the SEO gibberish that passes for text will drop your PR. SEs hate gibberish because it lessens the quality of the search results delivered to users. Tip #2 Keep it Fresh Google spiders your site every two weeks. Yahoo every 48 hours. Each time your site gets spidered, the bot takes a snapshot of your site. If you want to see it, click on the 'cache' link in your Google listing. That's what the bot saw the last time it stopped by. Now, when the bot comes back for another visit, it compares the snapshot (cache) to the current site. If nothing has changed in months, you start losing PR points. So add new content every once in while so it looks like your site is active - at least to the search engines. Tip #3 Be Helpful If you're site is nothing but a links farm, you're not being very helpful to that SE user and that makes SEs mad. SEs want to see fresh content, but they also want to see helpful, useful informational content, as well. Articles on your products or services. Not sales hype. Good informational copy. And keep you links in line. If you're selling baseball collectibles but you've got links to gourmet food sites, not good. That link isn't related to your business and it's taking the SE user further away from his or her intended search. Tip #4 Add a Site Map. Takes about 10 minutes, but it has a major impact on both your foot traffic and your SE rank. A site map, accessible to visitors, enables visitors to navigate quickly to the pages they most want to see. Very helpful of you. But more importantly, SEs spider site maps and are much more likely to pick up changes, and that new content you've been adding, much faster with a site map in place. Ten minutes. Big difference. Tip #5 Clean Out Your Meta Tags If you don't know a meta tag from a dog tag, talk to your webmaster/designer. Meta tags are part of the HTML code that is your website. Metas are where your keywords are stored. Keywords are the words that describe your site. If you're selling pet supplies, 'pet supplies' will be your number # 1 keyword. Now, some site owners believe that the more keywords you can stuff into your Metas the better. Maybe in the old days (pre-2003) there was some value to this strategy but not today. Search engines want to deliver the highest quality, most relevant results to its users. So, if your Meta tags look like this ...and on and on and on...the SE, not a deep thinker, won't necessarily know what to make of your on-line pet supply store. And you drop in PR. Choose the best five to seven keywords. No more. Change every 30 days to see which brings in more traffic. In a few months, you'll have your keyword list in place and your PR on the move. Tip #6 If It's Black Hat, Forget That SE spiders are programmed to detect and destroy sites that employ black hat tactics. For those unfamiliar with the term, black hats refer to the bad guys in old Westerns. Today, hackers, crackers, script kiddies and other socially maladjusted geeks employ a number of black hat tactics to try to fool visiting SEs. For example... Invisible text. Simply place white text on a white background and voila - invisible text. Or at least to the human eye. SEs can read this just fine. So, the invisible text might be describing a site selling gift baskets when, in fact, they're shipping marijuana grow lights by the hundreds. What you see on a web page isn't necessarily what you get. Any black or grey hat tactics are strongly frowned upon by SEs. They recognize it for what it is - deceit. So, if you really want to sink to the bottom of the digital pile, add some invisible text and a couple of redirects. Your site will never again see the light of day. Tip #7 Swap Links There's plenty of SEO metrics software out there to enable you to see who's linked to your competition. Well, if these sites are linked to your competition, contact them and offer a links exchange. Reciprocal links are good, but only if the links are related to the products, services or activities of your on-line business. Otherwise, they're garbage links and SEs treat them as such. Tip #8 The Open Directory Project The Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) is a perfect example of the concept of extreme trust that's making its way across the digital landscape. Sites are put up for consideration by, well, by you - the site owner. Once your site is submitted, it's reviewed by a volunteer editor (sign up to volunteer today to this most worthy experiment in worldwide, on-line egalitarianism). If everything's in order, your site will be listed in the appropriate category. So what, you're asking? Well, Google uses The Open Directory Project as the basis for the Google Directory. In other words, by signing up with the ODP, you get free entry into Google's powerful directory. Plus, you'll pick up traffic (and therefore PR) via dmoz.org. Hey, it's free! If you're just starting out with your e-commerce venture, or you're just earning enough to cover hosting fees, spend a day adding some juice to that thing. You don't have to spend thousands or even hundreds of bucks. Your kid could probably do it. Keep the site clean, uncluttered and understandable to an SE spider. It make take a couple of weeks, but you'll enjoy the ride as your site moves up in page rank.