Yesterday I looked at some of the issues that may help you rank better in Google. Today I will follow up on a few more observations. These are all taken from a Q&A session with Matt Cutts and others from Google – in effect, Google are starting to spill the beans on how to gain higher rankings.
A little more on links today. First, for a long time the general advice has been to get links from .edu and .gov sites. According to the Google team, don’t bother. They have no more value than any other link, in fact they will often have less value since few people link into them.
Mom/Dads who have more than one blog, often under the same host. In the past I have seen advice that sees don’t link them. Not so. Again it comes down to what is normal. If you have two, three or more blogs, it is natural to link them – how else can you tell your readers you have them? At the same time, don’t link through the footer. Sidebars and within content are the best link areas.
Bounce Rates – yes a high bounce rate will result in lower rankings. However it will be based on search terms used. If search term A has a high bounce rate from your site then you may find you get less traffic for that search term. At the same time search term B has a low bounce rate so you will find that your visitors for that search term will increase. Bounce rates are important but keep it all in perspective.
Other points worth noting – directories are not worth chasing unless they relate directly to your genre. Sitemaps: where possible it is a good idea to have both the XML and the HTML version.
The conclusion from this Q&A session. Link in, link out, encourage comments, if you use WordPress (or Drupal), there are plugins that will let you create unique pages for your posts. Unique title and descriptions are important.
If you have a couple of blogs or websites, don’t be afraid to link them to each other. Otherwise, create pages that users will find valuable. They will vote with their links, comments and bookmarks. That will be the key to future search rankings.
ah. good to hear about directories.
manual directory submission is just completely life draining. :O
Thanks for the great advice. I am currently trying to get a couple of websites up and into Google, this post will really help me to get a better page rank and hopefully more traffic comming in.
This is a great tip and it makes alot of sense. If someone has to manually add your link to their directory there is a better chance that it is a valid link and not just spam. I will be looking for these types of directories from now on. Thanks again!
“directories are not worth chasing unless they relate directly to your genre.” – I was aware of this before but it does surprise me as registering with directories is a completely normal thing to do.
I think the internet is currently full of people who are afraid to do a follow link to anyone. Out of curiousity i watch which internal links are no follow within websites, for some it is all internal and external links while for others it is none. there seems no set formula for which links you should follow and which you should nofollow.
Yes listening to Google is always a great advantage for sure. Nice advice, got to think on this. Really makes a lot of sense.