As I was checking the PR of some blogs, I stumbled across this post titled “Secret is out – How google ranks websites”. I think it’s worth reading so here’s the link to the orginal post.

When you write an article and submit it to the various article dirctories such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articledashboard.com, you have an option to place one or two backlinks to your site using your chosen anchor text. Some directories even let you add the links directly in the articles, so you should make use of that option.

Besides getting backlinks to increase your site’s ranking in the SERPS, article directories are very useful in pushing traffic to your site. If you write highly relevant articles to your niche, if the articles are unique and informative, and if your articles have a strong call to action (in our case clicking on the hyperlink that goes to our site), a very targeted niche population will be visiting your site. It is not for nothing that article marketing works. Some people actually get sales just from individuals clicking on the websites from the articles.

There are some heavy article marketeers around that are making their living only from writing to push sales. Interestingly another name for article marketing is ‘bum marketing’ started a while ago by a guy called Travis who started it all. The called it ‘bum marketing’ because it’s so easy to make money with article marketing that one could take a bum from the streets and push him to make money only by writing.

Once you write your articles and they get approved at the various ezines, make sure that you ping the article at the various pinging sites. One of them is Pingler.com. This will notify the relevant sites that your site or page has been updated and it can be crawled away. Also if your bio page at the relevant article directory site has an RSS feed, don’t forget to send it to RSS directories. This will propagate your site to lots of other sites giving you instant backlinks from all over the place.

Article marketing works very well, but some people are either lazy, or don’t like to write, or don’t know how to write well (or so they think). If you have any of these problems, you can very easily outsource your articles at places like Elance.com or iFreelance.com or Guru.com. There are practically thousands of hungry article writers who are willing to write your articles for very good prices. Usually the turnaround is also very fast. As soon as you get back your articles, post them at the various Ezines, then ping and RSS them for faster indexing by the search engines, so they can give you high PR link juice.

One of the answer is: all the time. And the other: you never really know.

How so? Well, the true pagerank is updated by Google in real time. After 3-4 months Google updates its green bar at the bottom of your browser. However, as we mentioned before, this is not a real pagerank. It is more an indication of where your site is  on the Google scale. However in real time, by now you might have 1-2 higher rankings than what your green bar shows you, or even lower, depending on how much you might have neglected your site recently. So you see, it’s really a question that noone can truly answer but Google, and they won’t. But if you are really curious, just enter in the Google search engine ‘Google update history’ and you should come up with the history of the updates so far. This way you can predict when a possible next update will be.

One of the best tips I’ve read over and over again is to not really focus on pagerank that much. Just make sure that your site is constantly updated with great content, that you are all the time busy getting relevant backlinks to your site and that your onsite (or onpage) SEO is done properly. Then the rest will take care of itself in due course.

Oh and by the way, the latest Google pagerank update (the green bar that is) was today

One of the important ways to get traffic to your website is PPC, or paid per click advertising. PPC is great if you know what to do, but in the hands of a newcommer it might prove financially deadly. With PPC you basically pay for the traffic. For each click you get to your site, you pay. And if the click is not profitable, if you don’t make sales, those clicks will add up to a nice chunk of change that you’ll see leave your bank account in a heartbeat. So if you want to start with PPC, make sure that you grasp the basics first before you jumping in with both feet. Google Adwords has a great set of tutorials that will teach you the basics on this, I recommend you check it out.

Search engine optimization, or SEO is another way to get traffic to your website. This traffic though will be organic, or free. Many search engine engineers are working hard on getting organic traffic instead of going after PPC. This really works both ways: if you get high rankings in Google, your traffic will increase by default, but also if you increase your traffic, your rankings will improve automatically over time.

Here are some important ways to get organic traffic from the search engines:

• Getting links from other sites – This is important because first of all you get traffic directly from people clicking on those links pointing back to your website and also because those links will help your rankings in the SERPS
• Posting on forums and blogs – This is quite an old way to get backlinks which works great. You need to find high traffic blogs and post comments (useful comments, not spam!) on articles. The best links will come from articles with high PR (or at least the blogs to be high PR) and if possible in the same niche you are in. So if you are selling diet related products, a diet related blog will be best for your purposes. Forums work in a similar way. You join a relevant discussion and in your reply in the thread you leave your backlink with your anchor text pointing to your site.
• Submitting articles to various ezines – This means of getting traffic to your site is quite popular nowadays. Sites such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Articlebase.com are all accepting articles that have links pointing to your website (make sure though that you check out each directory’s guidelines and TOS, else your article will not be accepted) and as they are quite high PR sites, your articles there will be indexed quite fast, giving you link juice to your site right away.

There are many other ways to get links to your site to increase traffic but these are the most important ones that guarantee success if done regularly and in an ethical manner.

When robots from Google and other search engines come crawling your site, they need to find all the pags and all the items on the pages very fast so they can index them. If they can’t find them, the pages will never be visible in the search engines.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when working on your website, way before you start backlinking strategies:

• Deep linking – Make sure that you don’t have a very deep linking. What I mean by this is that each of your pages should be easily accessible from your index page or at least from the second page. If you find you need too many clicks to access the page, then the robots won’t find it either.  Google considers that pages that can be accessed with one click from the main page must be important so it gives those pages the importance as well. From an SEO perspective the site architecture should be as flat as possible.
• Internal linking – The pages should be linked to each other on your site. You should cross link between relevant content. For example if you are talking about dogs, and you have two main categories, one for dog barking problems and one for dog aggression, the pages within dog barking should be linked to each other with relevant keywords, but they don’t have to be interlinked with pages from dog agreession, since that is somewhat of a different subject.
• Don’t forget to use anchor text. This is not only important for inbound links but also for links within your own site. Try to avoid using too much the phrase ‘Click here’.

Don’t forget, before you work on your offsite SEO you need to take care of your onsite factors that make your website pure gold in the eyes of Google and other search engines, and proper intenal linking and internal page structure is crucial in getting there.

Over 100 different ranking factors had to be evaluated by each participant, and the final results showed an interesting picture. The top 9 results were as follows:

• using keywords in the title tag
• relevant anchor text in inbound links
• global link authority of the site
• age of the site
• link popularity within the internal structure of the site
• the relevance of the inbound links
• link popularity of the site in the relevant niche
• keyword used in the text of the body
• general link popularity of the sites that link to the page

It seems that the most important facts that everyone agreed with was using the keyword in the title tag. We do know that this is important and having the major SEO guys also agree with this just reinforces all that we’ve already learned. Another important aspect is also the fact that the older the site, the better the ranking. So all things equal, a site 2 years old will rank better than a new registered site.

Another thing that is quite important, as we can see from the bullets above, is how relevant the sites linking to us are. Links coming from sites totally unrelated to the niche we are in still count, however if we can get some nice inbound links from the same type of sites will help us greatly in achieving high rankings. For example, if we’re in the acne niche and we are getting some great backlinks from some acne forums, that will count more than links from a Hollywood information blog).

So it is important to always keep these 9 points in mind when a new site is about to be setup, from purchasing or registering the domain to adding correct title tags right down to trying to get backlinks from relevant sites with proper anchor tags. All this will help in making sure that our site will shoot up in the rankings leaving other less SEO’d sites behind.

There are two aspects to Google pagerank. One is the ‘true’ pagerank that Google will never let you know (just like Coke will never release their secret recipe) and one which is months behind the true one, which you can visibly see on your Firefox taskbar, it’s called the little green bar. Please do not forget that what you see in the green bar is not the true pagerank, but nevertheless it is an indication of where you are at (or were at a few months ago).

But how can you see your pagerank, the visible one anyway?

First have a look at the screenshot below. Do you see that little green bar that I”ve highlighted with red? That is the visible pagerank.

And how can you actually see that, as Internet Explorer or Firefox doesn’t have it by default? Well, one way to do it is download the Google Toolbar. This places the PR line right away for you. All you need is hover the mouse over the green bar and the PR number will automatically display for you. This indicator is usually from 0 to 10 and for very new sites you might see an N/A (no rank yet). Of course one site where you will see the PR 10 is … Google.com.

Another option, if you don’t want to download the entire Google toolbar and you are using Mozzila Firefox is to download one of the Firefox extensions for Google PR. I won’t mention any particular one, as there are quite a few and new ones come in all the time, but if you go to the Firefox Addons, you can search for them quite easily.

But it is important to not get hand up on the toolbar, as it has been noticed that newbies tend to check their pagerank every day a couple of times You have to understand that the pagerank that is visible in the browser is only updated every 3-4 months in Google, so you can stop worrying about losing that moment when Google updates yours right now.

Once you created your website, added a few relevant pages and performed various onsite optimization techniques, you want your site to get indexed in Google, and that fast. The faster your site is indexed, the faster your chance to start climbing up the ranks. So here a few tips that will help your site get indexed in Google sometimes as soon as in 24 hours.

• Submit your site to Google (free) – You can submit your website to Google for free, and you only need to submit the main site for the Google bots to come visit and start crawling all the pages on your site. Click here to submit your site
• If you don’t have yet one, create a Google Webmaster Tools account. Once you do that, you need to submit your sitemap to Google (on that page there is plenty of help and information straight from Google on how to create and submit a sitemap). Also you need to validate your site first, so Google knows that the site is yours. Very easy to do, again just read up on it at Google Webmaster Tools and create your free account now.
• One thing I”ve personally noticed to help with fast indexing with Google is to social bookmark your site, particular at Digg and at Propeller. Spotback also works, but these two are known for having the Google bots practically sleeping at their doorsteps. If you don’t have an account with them (it’s free) go now and sign up to Digg and Propeller. You won’t be sorry.
• Ping your post or article. Each time you write a new article, make sure to ping it. Pinging means notifying various websites that  you have new content. Many of these pinging services actually notify Google blogs of it and you should make sure to use this opportunity all the time. Note: WordPress blogs are automatically pinged every time you post a blog. Here are some sites where you can ping your articles: Pingler, Pingmyblog and IPings.

By using any or all of these quick techniques you have a greater chance of Google indexing each of your pages extremely fast.

Well, I’m sure you’ve all heard of ‘link farms’, which are nothing but some quickly thrown together free blogs with crappy content that you can add your links to your website. These ‘parasite’ sites will never rank high in the search engines, particularly that many of them have either duplicate content, or they are something called ‘autoblogs’. Autoblogs means that the content is scrapped from other blogs. But more on that later.

So the equation will change if let’s say 100 of those 150 to your sites come from cheap link farms, while the 25 links going to your competitor’s site are quality links from high page rank sites. So you really need to keep both of these factors in mind when you want to improve your SERPS ranking and increase your PR with Google.

So here are a few tips to improve your rankings:

1. Get many quality imbound links to your site. And not only to your site, but to the various pages of your site. Remember that each page on your website can and will have a different page rank with Google as well as a different position in the SERPS
2. Make sure your Title Tag is properly optimized on each of your webpages. Title tag is what goes between HTML <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD> on your page.
3. Make sure that the keyword density is ‘just right’ for your site. There are SEO specialists who say anything between 1.5-3% is perfect, while others go as high as 5-6%. What I suggest is that you should have your keywords once in your first paragraph, possibly towards the beginning of it, once or twice in the middle of your article, and once towards the end, in your closing paragraph. The most important thing is to sound natural to the reason, without ‘stuffing’ your keywords all over the place in the article for ‘Google love’. Don’t forget, you want to attrack readers, not only bots, since the readers will make you that money, the bots won’t.
4. If you use images on your site, don’t forget to optimize them as well. By this I mean using the ALT tag for your images. Apparently Google indexes the text that are in the ALT tag of your images, so you should not waste any legit opportunity to get that opportunity for higher ranking in the search engines