How to Improve Your Google Listing and Achieve a Higher Search Engine Ranking

There are many ways in which you can improve your Google listing, and some work better than others depending on the type of website you have or on your niche. Here are ways in which you can get a higher Google ranking, or even a better search engine ranking in general.

We shall forget about onpage SEO such as use of meta tags and use of keywords since that has been done to death by now. There are other things that you can do to improve your search engine ranking, and among them are:

1. Put a site map on your website. You can generate an XML site map using any of several tools listed on Google, and a simple, search should enable you to find one. Once you have followed the instructions, you should submit the site map to Google and to Yahoo, and each will then be able to crawl your website without hindrance. It will also be updated each time the search engines crawl your site because XML sitemaps update as you add new pages to your site. Your site map should uploaded to the root directory of your website.

2. Start up a blog using one of the two main free blogging hosts, Blogger or Wordpress. In fact, why not use both and get the benefit of each? Blogger is owned by Google, so a Blogger blog is of particular benefit for Google listings. Put the URL of the pages of your website that you want promote on your blog, and these pages will be visited next time your blog is crawled.

3. Open an account with Technorati, and some of the other social bookmarking sites, and submit your blog to them. Ping them each time you make a new posting, and you will get good exposure to search engines whenever they visit these sites (which is very often).

4. Use social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to advertise your blog, or even your website. In fact put both your blog and your website on these sites, and you will get one-way back-links to your site, thus improving your Google PageRank and search engine results positions.

5. Make sure that all of your links are open. Nothing ruins your Google listing than broken links, and you must test all of your links to make sure that they are all working. You aren't expected to do that manually, and there is software available online to test your links for you.

6. Avoid reciprocal links like the plague, unless you have arranged them privately and both of you are happy with their positioning. Links farms, and large list pages on which you are at #259 on the SEO page, are not only useless with respect to any PageRank votes, but can actually do you harm. So steer clear of them. There are enough ways of securing one-way links without having to negotiate reciprocal links. These days are long gone.

7. Register with Google Webmaster Tools, and check out their analysis of your website. The software can detect broken links, but more importantly, can carry out other tasks such as making sure that only one form of your URL is recognized, and checking out your Meta tags. Although these are not used as much as previously, they are used or Google wouldn't be checking them for you!

8. Register for a free Squidoo lens, and use your URL on that. Not simply just as a URL, but as a means of solving a problem. A Squidoo lens is like a mini-website, and you can use it to present a problem, and then your website as a solution. Not only does that get you one-way back-links to your choice of website page, but also the potential of loads of traffic: people that want their problem solved.

So there are eight methods of promoting your website and improving your search engine ranking. There e other ways to improve your Google listing, but these are very effective off site methods of doing so, other than 1 and 5 that are essential on-site techniques - even more important than meta tags and the correct html tags.

Apply each one of these and you should be rewarded with an improved Google listing, and your search engine ranking in general should be enhanced.

Author: Peter Nisbet