Thursday, July 27, 2006

Hit whores

I know you're all clever (and goodlooking - obviously, as we all know the internet appeals to the beautiful), so how do I get my babylicious website to score high on Google?

And HONESTLY, I thought I made up the word babylicious until about 3 days ago when I typed it into Google thinking my new website would pop up, and what the? There are about a squillion babylicious mo fos out there.

7 comments:

Edward Sargisson said...

Get sites to link to yours. Get sites with lots of traffic to link to yours. Buy an AdWord from Google so that your site is listed by suitable results.

Google's success is built on returning search results that are relevant to the search terms. Early search engines were subject to having pages lie about themselves in order to improve their ranking. Google's insight was to heuristically measure the value of a page by the number of links from other sites to that page and the quality of the sites that link to that page.

Lots of people claim to know how to raise your ranking in Google but Google is in that arms race too and keeps ahead of them.

Build a good site that people like going to.

Martha Craig said...

Yay Red, cheers. My google listing is looking a little shabby at the moment - who knew this internet thing was so insane?

Now I just need to top the rankings when people search on "baby clothes".

Anonymous said...

link a blog to your site. Updated often and Google will keep re-indexing. Can you give this one two URLs?

Martha Craig said...

Hmm. I actually would like to call the clothes "Wanda Harland", but I may need to leave that for my hussy range of adult clothing.

Anonymous said...

They're looking at excluding blogs from the Google algorithm, or, that is, returning blog results separately just like images and news, because of the different way bloggers read and reread and link to each other skewing Google results, so yes, getting blogs to link will work for a while, but don't bank on it for long.

Not only do you need lots of sites to link to your site, it's even better if they are similar to one another. eg 100 sites discussing 100 different subjects ranging from Elvis sightings through the history of the monarchy to results of clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, for example, will not give you as good a ranking as 100 sites discussing clothes for children.

Sorry - Google rankings take time. If you have a Google account, though, you can at least track what search terms people use to find you - let me know if you want to know more.

Kate Borrell said...

Apart from paying for it here are some other tips that will help improve your search engine ranking:

- the keywords should be links, for example don't use things like "< u >click here< /u > to see the cute baby Elvis tshirt". Make < u >Baby Elvis tshirt< /u > the link.

But be careful how many times you a keyword as too much is as bad as not enough.

- Weighting of the keyword, eg is it at the top of the page, in a heading or included in links?

- Use alt tags on all your images. This means words appear when you hover over the image. It also handy for when the image won't load in the page and for visually impaired people who let their computers do the talking!

- Getting people to link to your site. The more people that link to your website the better your site ranking will be. Popularity breeds popularity!

- Using key search words on your page and in the meta tags (I'll take a look at yours in a sec). Make sure what you use in your meta tags is also used in the body content of your site. Think about what words people will use to find your site. eg "aotearoa made baby clothing" ;)

Meta tags tend to be ingored because some sites load up on them to get hits - but if you combine your content and tags then your ranking should improve.

It takes quite a while for your ranking to improve as bots and crawlers won't be trolling your site every day or week.

Hope this helps.

Martha Craig said...

Wonderful thank you. We had to get rid of the meta tags we'd put in, because they kept not being invisible, and making the homepage look sketchy.

God, the easiest thing would be if I was loaded and could pay someone to do all the thinking.

I'll go through and pay attention to what we've got as the photo names too, because I wasn't really paying attention when I wrote them.

Thankyou thankyou thankyou to everyone for all your help.