by Chris Ridings

Probably one of the most important things to have when starting a new page is a high search engine ranking. With most sites, search engines can account for up to 95% of traffic. If youre not placed in the first three pages, its unlikely youll get any visitors from a search engine. Google is one of the fastest growing search engines, a high listing here will guarantee you visitors . Googles results are also used by Yahoo when its finished displaying its own results. To get a high ranking in google you positive need to design your pages and promotional methods around it.

First lets look at how google rates pages, obviously their exact ranking system is secret but the following gives a fair idea:

1. Google works using PageRank. This is a system that allocates a page a score depending on its importance. This is calculated by looking at all the pages that hyperlink to it and how important they are. The more pages that backlink , the higher the score. The greater the rank of the page pointing to your website , the more it contributes to your pages rank. To proverb some of the original google researchers: "For most popular subjects, a simple writing matching search that is restricted to web page titles performs admirably when PageRank prioritizes the results". This is important. This tells us that the two most important things to ranking in google are the pages PageRank and its Title!

2. If a page links to your page (which point 1 tells you is a requirement to any reasonable ranking), then the text of the link to your page counts towards your ranking!

3. Google makes extensive utilize of "Proximity". This means google looks at pages and might tell how close key words are together. So if the searcher enters "antique spectacles", then the writing "antique spectacles" in your document would help slightly more than "antiques and spectacles" and much more than "antique items which include many things such as spectacles". There are ten levels of proximity that words can have.

4. Google looks at visual presentation such as: size of writing to the rest of the document and boldness of writing .

5. Each keyword is looked at and ranked: Title, anchor, URL, text in a large font, writing in a small font. Each applying a different weighting.

6. Each of the factors above are calculated in with different ratings. The format of your page has a large effect to start off with but quickly tapers off so a finite limit is reached (i.e. you cannot just fill your page with hundreds and hundreds of copies of perfectly formatted writing ). This implies that the rule of each keyword applying 3 to 7 times in each 100 words should most definately be okay.

So your approach to getting a nice ranking on google should be to develope and submit your page as follows.

1. Pick your keywords.

2. Ensure your keywords are included in the Title of the document, they MUST be placed next to each other for a sizeably successful ranking. If this isnt the home page (i.e. index.html etc) then name it after your keywords. i.e. keywords-here.html. If your domain name includes the keywords then all the better.

3. Repeat the keywords near the top of your page using header tags or at least a large font. Again, make sure they are as close together as possible. ("Antique Spectacles" is better than "Antiques and Spectacles")

4. Design your site with as many pages as possible. Page size doesnt matter but remember that the effect of keywords tapers off so its probably best to build 300 a maximum. Try to repeat each keyword 3 to 7 times for every hundred words.

5. Keywords should be repeated throughout the whole page , not just the page. Use links back to the home page with the keywords in if possible.

6. Ask as many sites as possible to backlink to you. Get them to use your keywords in the backlink text. Forget about Free For All Links or Link Farms, Google considers them spamming and can penalise your site. Do a search for similar sites on google and start trying to get links on the sites that are shown, in all probability they have the high PageRank score thatll help you most. You want LOTS of links.

7. Submit. Also submit to Yahoo, yahoo has a very high PageRank (if you might get on