Now we are going to take a look at Google, still being the most important search engine for anyone seeking to promote his/her website in search engines. Even though in the recent months Google's rivals like Yahoo and MSN became much more prominent, Google can still deliver the most traffic to your website.
There are several things you will need to understand about Google's system of indexing web pages before you can successfully optimize your website and get good search engine ranking. Google ranks importance of your web page based on how many "important" websites are linking to that page. By important websites we mean websites that have a good PageRank themselves (PageRank will be explained later in this section). Optimization of your website is also important but you won't get far with just on-site optimization. Try getting as many backlinks as possible.
PageRank. Many people like to see their Google PageRank rise but most of them do not understand what PR5 or PR6 really means. If you think of every backlink to your website as a vote then PageRank is an indicator of how many votes you have. Of course, it is not 1:1 ratio but each point in the PageRank represents certain amount of backlinks. It also seems that Google starts viewing web page as "important" starting from PR4.
Link Anchor Text. For quite some time, it has been a well known fact that in order to rank well with the search engines, a page must have a large number of inbound links (link popularity). now everybody knows, however, that the text of each link is probably even more important then the number of links themselves. When Googlebot (spider) encounters a link to your site and sees that the anchor text has your keywords in it, it will consider your website more relevant to those keywords. To give you an example of how important link anchor text is, let's suppose that you run a dating site, and that you want it to rank very high with the search engines for the search term "dating". If you had 100 links pointing to your website, and the anchor text of all of them said "click here", they wouldn't tell Google or any other search engines a whole lot about your site. The search engines will therefore have trouble knowing that your site is about dating (they will have to try other ways to find out, like crawling the text of your page), and most likely won't assign your page a good position in the search results pages. However, if instead of "click here", the anchor text on those links said "dating", the search engines would easily conclude that your site is an authority on web design, and will give your site a high ranking.
Here are some search engine optimization tips that will help you improve your odds with getting good ranking with Google or any other crawler-based search engine:
Location: Pay special attention to the first 25 words and the last paragraph, making certain your keyword always appears in these spots.
Keyword Density : This is the ratio between number of times you used the keyword in the body and the total number of words in the body; each search engine treats this a little different. Before you spend too much time dwelling on the numbers, the bottom line is that words with a higher frequency on your page will seem more relevant to the search engine. But, don't over do it. The newest Google update may penalize sites with a keyword frequency that is too high. You never want your pages to look artificially optimized... you want the content on your page to be interesting to your visitors.
Title Tag: The title tag has to contain your keyword and it should be between 4 and 12 words. There has been much written about the keyword density in the title; we have found that tightly focused titles perform best with Google and try to keep your important keyword at the beginning.
Meta Tags: The description and keyword tags do not really matter to Google. On the other hand; they are important to some other search engines so go ahead and optimize these. A good description tag contains your keyword and has between 12 and 24 words. No need to overdo it... just a good, concise description of the page.
Link Text: Whenever possible, use text links in your web pages and NOT images to link to other pages in your website. Googlebot cannot read images. When the Googlebot visits your site, it navigates your pages via text links - make certain your pages link to each other and use the primary keyword for each page as the text. Also, always use a site map that is linked from the home page.
Inbound Links: Get a link to your website from another website and Googlebot will find your site. Make certain the link is from a site that is already listed and ranked with Google. Getting ranked highly by Google involves getting many inbound links. If you use our link popularity tool, you'll see that Google displays a number of links to your site. Click the number and you will see a list of sites that link to you. If not all the sites that link to you are on the list; it is because Google lists links from web pages whose PageRank is 4 or higher. In order to increase your results in Google, you need links from sites whose main pages have a high Google Page Rank and whose link pages are similarly well ranked.