[ianharper]

Wpclean

the way google knows that your site is active and you are updating it is by the size on the page if google visits and the page is the same size as last time it will know that its not been updated and is out of date.

google wants to give its searches up to date information and prides itself on it.

The bottom line is forget all that SEO stuff and just use AdWords. you will get lots of clicks this way but don't expect every one to call you. how you tell whats going on the time spent on the page. if its less than it takes you to read it then its interesting to the prospect.

with AdWords you will be able to tell what your doing wrong. for example i have a video that runs for about two minutes so that's the least amount of time i would expect a prospect to be on that page.

By looking at your page this way you can change things until they start to work.

The place we all need to be in is knowing how much each customer costs. by knowing this all we need do is then buy the amount that we need. easier said than done. but a much more scientific way of doing things.

its all about numbers

Respect

Ian Harper

[Window Washers]

Wpclean

the way google knows that your site is active and you are updating it is by the size on the page if google visits and the page is the same size as last time it will know that its not been updated and is out of date.

google wants to give its searches up to date information and prides itself on it.

The bottom line is forget all that SEO stuff and just use AdWords. you will get lots of clicks this way but don't expect every one to call you. how you tell whats going on the time spent on the page. if its less than it takes you to read it then its interesting to the prospect.

with AdWords you will be able to tell what your doing wrong. for example i have a video that runs for about two minutes so that's the least amount of time i would expect a prospect to be on that page.

By looking at your page this way you can change things until they start to work.

The place we all need to be in is knowing how much each customer costs. by knowing this all we need do is then buy the amount that we need. easier said than done. but a much more scientific way of doing things.

its all about numbers

Respect

Ian Harper

Ian With all due respect, thats totally wrong for the window cleaning market and telling people to forget about seo is like telling someone to only use a 4ft pole for every job, it is not all about numbers at all, it is about quality leads. Do you work for google, because adsense is very expensive for any novice with very poor results.

you want quality leads hitting your site not every tom dick and harry thats in competition with you costing you money, So it is not all about numbers, I would agree with you if there was a product for sale, but for window cleaning it is a service.

p.s i have a few sites that I have not touched this year that are ranked page 1 on google so what your saying is not totally true far from it. Google likes quality content, by just updating your site means very little if your not updating your site with what google is looking for.

Ian

[darren clarke]

what is google looking for?

[wpclean]

Thanks for the comments guys  .  My site is listing highly for the services I am offering , just not getting many calls !  Having said that I got an email enquiry today which I have just quoted for  .

[Nathanael Jones]

While pagerank is important, many sites with a 0 pagerank will still be listed on page one of the search results for the right keywords,.. so there's no need to panic if your site doesn't yet have a pagerank.

If you download the Google toolbar it'll show you the pagerank of every site you visit.

Like Ian says, there are tricks to improve ranking, but nothing beats quality content.

Working on your text & thinking about it from the customers perspective (What information would you want/need to see if you were searching for a cleaner?) and plenty of photo's (Don't forget decent descriptive alt text) is all you need to get a significant boost in your ranking & also improve the ratio of website visitors who actually pic up the phone and call you.

[Dave Willis]

do you get page rank from being listed on google, my page does well for targetted keywords but cant work out what page rank it has if any, i think the latter unfortunately

How is PageRank calculated?
To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

That's the equation that calculates a page's PageRank. It's the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren't telling us what it is. It doesn't matter though, as this equation is good enough.

In the equation 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has and 'd' is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85.

We can think of it in a simpler way:-

a page's PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of every page that links to it)

"share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page.

A page "votes" an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to.

From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it.

If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,.....PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links.

Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site's PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms.

Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn't give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn't a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page's PageRank value. It's like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren't given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we'll see later.

Ok so far? Good. Now we'll look at how the calculations are actually done.

For a page's calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank "voted" for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page's PageRank was calculated.

The equation shows clearly how a page's PageRank is arrived at. But what isn't immediately obvious is that it can't work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:-

Step 1: Calculate page A's PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn't been worked out yet, so page A's new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can't be accurate.

Step 2: Calculate page B's PageRank from the value of its inbound links

Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can't be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate.

It's a Catch 22 situation. We can't work out A's PageRank until we know B's PageRank, and we can't work out B's PageRank until we know A's PageRank.

Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can't we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate.

The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iterations wouldn't produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it's the reason why the updates take so long.

One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page's actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.

Sean read the above: google boogles minds and changes things regular, seo and page rank are a nightmare field. people thinking make there own website, put it online and it will be great from them are clearly in need of medical help. Things that cost money usually do for good reason, getting money hits from google, yahoo, bing ect are not easy they take time and money.

Someone are very lucky if they get rank 1 page 1 google asap, I know I have dont it loads of times, the problem is keeping it there and maintaining it on the first page. I am rank 3 page 1 google and have been for years (not blowing my trumpet, just being honest I was ranked 4 page 1 but I added a well known person on this site to mine and got taken down 1 rank

I stopped offering this service to people as I got asked way to many questions and people wanted it free of charge.

Nat is finding out now what I mean or should have learnt by now, as he started to do the same thing as me about a year ago. 

I just offer pages on my site now as this helps people with there ranking, I dont need the hassle of the rest 

Ian

p.s I need to speak with you shortly

That's impressive - where did you copy that from? 

[traps7]

Lol.
I read about three lines and then realised it was totally over my head.

[Dave Willis]

Here you go then Traps, I've put it in laymans terms for you. If you follow my advice you won't go far wrong

1. Keyword Use In Title Tags
The title tag is probably the single most important HTML tag, not only because Google considers it to be a very important ranking factor, but also because Google uses the title tag text to create the listing's heading (the blue link) on the search results. It is therefore equivalent to the headline of an ad inciting searchers to visit the site.

2. Global Link Popularity of Site
Last year this would have been considered the single most important factor. However, recent changes in the Google algorithm have slightly reduced the importance of the overall number of inbound links pointing to the site. The factor is still extremely important and weight, authority and relevance of the links are also factored into considerations.

3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
The text contained within the link (between the <a> and [/url] tags in the HTML) is called the anchor text. This text serves as a description of the link's target, and is hence a very clear indication to users and the search engine of what the target page will be about. As a result, this continues to be a very important factor in ranking a site.

4. Link Popularity within Site's Internal Link Structure
Unlike external links from third-party websites, internal links are fully within the control of the webmaster. How these internal links are structured gives Google a very clear indication of which pages are more important for the site owners. Accordingly, Google perceives this as an internal vote for the importance of individual pages.

5. Age of Site
Authority of a site, according to the Google algorithm is determined by two main factors: The number and quality of links pointing to it and the age of the site, in terms of the period of time that the site has contained indexable content seen by the search engines. Webmasters have no control over this factor. The only way to affect this is by buying old websites.

6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site
Relevance has always been the mantra of Google ranking, and this factor is a mere extension of that fact. Not only is it important to have lots of links pointing to a site, but it is also important that a good number of these links are from sites related to the topic of the target page and the target keyword.

7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community
Increased use of social networking sites and user generated content has turned the Internet and SEO around in the past year. Accordingly, a new factor now considered of importance is the link weight and authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.

8. Keyword Use in Body Text
Link bombs and spam linking enabled websites to be ranked, in the past, for keywords that were not even present on the site. This has changed. Google will almost never rank a site now based solely on links pointing to it, no matter how many they may be. Use of the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page is a must.

9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
This is all about PageRank of the site that is providing a link. Number and quality of links matter. The quality of the link is determined by its relevance and by its own link popularity. Hence, a single link from an extremely popular (high PR) website will be worth much much more than many more links from a relatively unknown site.

10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site
Sudden spikes in the number of inbound links pointing to a site are unnatural. Google constantly monitors the frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain, even though this may not be reflected in the link counts they show on their search results. A steady upward growth rate is always best.

11. Always have a picture of a shiny new van on your site and maybe a semi-naked lady answering the telephone always helps.

I've found this method always works the best for me in the past.

[traps7]

I wasn't knocking what Ian put. I've no doubt you all know your stuff. But I must admit though I do find it hard to follow. Thanks for taking the time though.

[Window Washers]

p.s I need to speak with you shortly

That's impressive - where did you copy that from? 

a website that explains about page rank Dave. :