Instead of entering your URL into your browser, search Google for your site. Google is more apt to improve the ranking of a site that users seek and visit than one that gets no traffic from Google.
When I first made this site publicly available, Google Guide wasn’t in the first 100 sites on searches for [ Google guide ]. Thanks to the sites that linked to Google Guide and users who clicked on Google Guide in their search results, Google Guide is in the top ten results for many queries that relate to the content of the site. Being listed so highly on Google has improved the traffic flow to Google Guide.
Note: For the top ranked site, Google sometimes includes useful links from within that site.
Avoid devious tactics to improve your ranking.
If Google suspects that you are trying to deceive it web crawler and thus its users by including hidden text, misleading or repeated words, pages that don’t match your sites description, deceptive redirects, duplicate site or pages, or other disingenuous tactics, then Google may delist your site from its index.
And finally…
In addition to considering the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of factors including
- how fast a site is gaining links
- how long the links persist
- when your site acquired the links
- the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar
- the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)
These factors and many others are described in the article “Great Site Ranking in Google The Secret’s Out” on Buzzle.com.
Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance. Google Guide’s placement in Google’s search results sometimes changes when Google modifies or enhances their indexing algorithms.
I don’t try to keep up with the latest search engine optimization tricks. Instead I strive to make searching Google easier by educating users about Google services, capabilities, and features. When I am successful, sites link to Google Guide pages and increase their ranks and importance to Google.
