Google Rankings

Oriel

Hi Folks,
Having just done two new websites, I'm looking to know if anybody can say, for sure, how google ranks it's sites? I'v done (personal) sites before, where I've haven't had any real problems googling for them, but one of these sites is a commercial venture, so I'm looking to boost the rankings as much as I can.
Apart from the "referral" system, is there anything else I can try? I'm pretty sure the meta-tag doesn't work anymore...

Cheers,
S.

MrNuked

No one can say for sure; the algorithm is secret.
Descriptive text links are important within the site as well as having as many as possible coming into it. A site map is a good way of adding lots of these. Don;t have too many (<50) links on a page.
I think keeping the site well structured (not too deep) helps too.
Flash content etc is not searched.
Then there's obvious stuff like using descriptive words for the file and page titles and in the content, without spamming.

Seth Brundle

Given Ryanair's homepage title has given then #1 spot for the search "easyjet low fares", I would recommend thoughtful and appropriate page titles before anything else. However, as many links as possible to your site, valid code, etc. should also help

mneylon

Read this:
http://pr.efactory.de/e-pagerank-algorithm.shtml

tomED

As MrNuked says, no-one can know for sure exactly how google ranks its web results. However, there are plenty of proven theories out there.

Meta-content is still important, but google seems to ignore keywords now, but it still values the description tag.

The title of your pages are very important as is the content on your page. Links back to your site is also very important and the use of of anchor tags also.

There are many techniques - is your seriuos look at a few of the seo forums such as www.seochat.com - you will get some good advice there. But it will take time.

Contrary to what MrNuked says - flash is now searched by Google. They have been working on it for a while now and you may have started to notice in search results in google [flash] in front of your search results. An example can be seen here http://www.google.ie/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&as_qdr=all&q=google+filetype%3Aswf&meta= - but for decent results I would still steer clear of flash!

mneylon

SeoChat have a bunch of tools for querying google et al about your site, including PR and predicted future PR.