If you have done any reading on Google search engine results placement, you will know that essentially, Google ranks a page depending on the number of quality links it has pointing to it.  If we had two identical pages and one had 50 quality incoming links and the other had 10 quality incoming links, the page with more links would rank higher.

Improving your search engine ranking on Google

If you have been reading the various webmaster forums, you will have come across many tips on improving your search engine ranking on Google.  This SEO article looks at the more pertinant tips and assumes that you know how to get the search engines to index all of your webpages.

Getting Inbound Links

Obviously, as Google ranks pages depending on the number of quality incoming links, you need to try and get as many incoming links from related external pages as possible.  Please note that internal links, a link from one of your pages to another page on the same domain do not carry the same link juice as external links do.

Title Tags

The Google algorithm weights the Title tag, the pages title that appears within the header tag.  Improving your search engine ranking on Google requires that each Title tag is both meaningful to the page that it appears on and is unique on that domain.  It is also crucial that your Title tag contains at least your primary keyphrase for that page.

Keyword Density

Google in particular considers keyword density to be an important factor when ranking a webpage in the search engine results.  When improving your search engine ranking on Google using keyword density, it is important not to flood your content with your keywords and keyphrases, a keyword density of around 5% is optimal.

Keyword Rich Links

Have a look at this paper on The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine, written by one of Googles founders.  He states that if the link to a page contains that pages keyword, it will cause that page to rank higher in the search engine results.  For example, a link to this page, where the anchor text was improving your search engine ranking on Google, would cause this page to rank higher for that serch term, than if the link anchor text was "click here".

Additional Google Tips

In addition to the above, here are a few points worth clearing up, with reference to improving your search engine ranking on Google.

Does Disabling Cache Affect Page Rank

A few years ago, some webmasters claimed that Google was penalising pages that they were prevented from caching.  By default, the Google spider caches the pages that it indexes  Google does allow webmasters to instruct its spider not to cache the page for a variety of resons, copyright infringement being one of them.  Google has openly admitted that this is not the case and that it does not penalise pages based on whether or not the Google spider can cache the page or not.

Image Alt Tags

Google indexes the image Alt tag, so if you have been adding images without completing the alt tags, nows the time to go and correct this as it is an important aspect of building search engine friendly websites.

Meta Keywords Tag

These days Google ignores the Meta Keyword tag, so spending hours on your Meta Keyword tags might help in some of the other search engines, but will not affect your Google rank at all.

Google and Dynamic Pages

Google is one of the few search engines that is able to index dynamically generated pages as long as there are links to it.  One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to create a sitemap, see my article how to get the search engines to index all of your webpages for more on creating a sitemap.