Can You Pass Google's Credit Check?

Getting your site listed on the first page of Google's search results is a bit like getting a loan from a bank.
You aren't likely to be approved for a loan if you have no income and no credit history. It's too risky for the bank to extend credit to those who aren't worthy of it.
Google trades in a different currency... traffic, and just like the banks assess risk before lending money, Google will assess risk before "lending" traffic.
Google may not care if you've ever paid a bill late, but make no mistake about it... they have their own version of a credit check and you need to pass it in order to be found in their search results.
The Google credit check is of course the process of determining "Page Rank".

Nobody outside of Google, and probably very few people on the inside actually know how page rank is calculated. There are a number of factors, but exactly what they are and how they're weighted is about as closely guarded as the recipe for coca-cola.
We may not ever know the formula in its entirety, but we don't need to. The most important ingredients are always obvious. Sugar and water for coca-cola... Relevance and Link Popularity for Google Page Rank.
Relevance is something Google is very good at figuring out. If you sell widgets on your site, as long as Google has crawled it... they know your site is about widgets and you're already in the result set for the search term "widgets".
The problem is that no matter what you do in terms of optimizing the content and structure of your website, it is going to start out on the last page of the result set instead of page 1, and that's where it will stay until you establish your credit history (link popularity).
Google's own assessment of relevance isn't sufficient for anything other than inclusion in a result set. To move you up in the result set, Google has to be sure your site will actually be perceived as relevant and important by human beings.
That's where the link popularity comes in. If webmasters of other sites that Google thinks are in some way relevant to widgets see fit to send traffic to your widget site, then that confirms to Google that human beings will perceive relevance.
Inbound links form your credit report, which is an indication of human perception of relevance. That's what makes Google comfortable with sending their traffic to you.

If you want traffic, and the top spot on Google, then you need to get other webmasters to link to you from relevant sites... period.
Fortunately, that is a very easy thing to accomplish. It simply involves offering something of value in exchange for each link you receive. There are literally dozens of ways to do this for free... and on a massive scale.

Google Sitemaps

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps? 

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly "optimized", and many of the people who couldn't care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company's address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don't even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That's because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn't have to be "broken" for a robot to have trouble crawling it's pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn't have this feature, then it's always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as "http", "www", and "com" - terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website's copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don't contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don't know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google's discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn't want to give the spammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

Optimize YOUR Page Title

Please optimize YOUR page title! It’s so boring I’m sure you wouldn’t want to steal it. Seriously, in this article I’m going to explain what page titles are (as opposed to post titles or article titles) and how and why to optimize them.
Look at the top of your browser, above the address bar and the line of links labeled File, Edit, etc. Next to the symbol for the browser itself you’ll find a title. That is the page title. It should not be confused with the actual title of this article, even though the two read nearly the same.
In HTML, you specify a web page’s title in its title element. You use title tags, like so:

With some content management or blogging systems, you can specify a title tag that is different from the title you give to the post or article on that page. You might find that very desirable for SEO purposes. Other CMS platforms might not have that functionality built in, but boast plug-ins that extend their native capabilities. For example, the popular blogging platform WordPress isn’t optimized for SEO.
You may want to optimize both your page title and your article/post title. Since the two have different purposes, you may even want to have two significantly different titles. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as both of them are relevant. You may also choose to make your page title and your article/post title the same (or nearly so), as you’ll find I do on many of my pages. There’s nothing wrong with that, either.
But maybe you’re wondering why you should optimize your page title at all. Or perhaps you’ve put a few keywords into your title and you figure you’re done. Or maybe you came up with a page title that you believe is good enough to use on every page of your site. Next time I’ll explain why you want to optimize your page titles as soon as I stop cringing.