For yall you SEO newbie’s, Page Rank(PR) is Google’s way of measuring the importance of a page only, it is not a measure for the entire site.  Page rank is determined by the number of quality, relevant, themed sites that link to that page, Google class this as a vote for that page and rank it higher! 

To increase your ranking keep an eye of your page rank, generally if your PR increases so will your ranking!

Google likes to find site naturally rather than by force, however leaving it to the spiders takes time and can take upto 30 days.  The best way is to submit your homepage to Google.  This is the Google add url page and it’s pretty easy to understand.  This page will only submit your url to one data center though!  If you want to submit quickly to all datacenters then I suggest you look at the Google data-centers list.

Another way is to submit a sitemap to Google. To submit a site map to Google, you need to register for a webmasters account. Sitemaps can be submitted in a number of formats but the best by far is an xml sitemap.  If you dont know how to generate an XML sitemap don’t worry there are plenty of free sitemap generators on the web that will do it for you.  Once you have your Google Webmasters account and your free XML sitemap you can submit it easily under the sitemap tab in Google webmaster tools.

It’s not enough however, to just have a small amount of irrelevant backlinks to you site, you need a lot and they have to be high quality. The higher the quality the higher the rank your site will get.

So first lets look at High Quality Backlinks:

They have to be one way links (non-reciprocal) and they have to come from sites with a high page rank.  The site has to be relevant to your keyword topic and the page there coming from has to have no more than 20 backlinks. The site has to have your keyword in its title tag, description tag and keyword tag, it has to have your keword in a H1 tag and H2 tag(if possible) and the theme of the page must be relevant to your overall website topic (these procedures must be followed for optimum backlink quality).

Getting high quality backlinks is a very hard task and requires a lot time and money.  Webmasters will not link to a site with little or no Page Rank, so already you are banging your head against a brick wall.  If your site has good quality relevant content people will want to link to it.  Do not embark on a paid backlinks campaign, Google are penalising heavily for this and it could cause you bigger problems in ranking. 

My advice for high pr, high quality backlinks is this: Search the web for your major keywords, look at all the site’s in the first 6 pages, look at there PR make sure its above 3, then see if they have a blog or forum and try to post a good comment or article there.  See if they have a links page, if they do and it requires a reciprocal link set up a new domain with your keyword in it, add some content and a links page and use that domain for your reciprocal links.  This is called three way linking and gets around the usual Google recipocal problem.

There is no fast solution to gaining high quality backlinks just hard work and determination!

The proper syntax for the keyword tag HTML tag is: <META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=”Your keywords go here.”>

The description tag should have between 9 and 15 words with your main keywords placed at the beginning of the tag for prominence, try to include your keywords only once.  Google no longer analyses the desription tag through its algorithm to determine rankings in the SERP’s, it only uses it as a description in the search engine results pages. Therefore for SEO and Google it’s not important. However if you do not include it on your page, Google will add random text from your home page as a description in the serach engine results pages, so my advice is include it!

The keywords tag is not used by Google and will not help in your search engine rankings, therefore only use it if you want to rank in Yahoo or MSN Etc…

Always include the tag on every page in your site, always make sure that each title tag is unique and not duplicated.  This tag should be the first in the head section of the html, it should have between 6 and 9 words.  You can put your company name in it but remember that the first words in the tag will have the most weight and prominence, therefore put your main keywords or phrase first. Avoid stop words like to at the etc… these words will decrease the weight and prominence.

The title tags looks like this <title>Search Engine Optimisation Blog - SEO Google</title>.

Without a title tag you do not stand a chance of being ranked for competitive keywords, a title tag that is not optimised is useless and will give you no advantage in the algorithmic search engine like Google and Yahoo.

Ok so if you have’nt heard of the H1 tag, its a header tag which uses a larger font and it’s styled in upper case and bold by default.  The search engine’s love this tag as it is used to show the most important keyword of the page and help to rank the page accordingly.  Put two of three of your keywords in this tag or one phrase, get it as close to the <body> tag as you can,  its prominence needs to be as close to 100% as you can get.

DO NOT put more than 1 H1 tag on a page as will decrease the weight of the keywords. Put all other secondary keywords in h2 and h3 tags.

Other than the title tag this is probably the most important tag!

An example of an h1 tag would be <h1>Search Engine Optimisation</h1>. In general h1 tags are pretty ugly and can mess up the asthetics and overal design of page. There is a solution, use css to style the tag, an exaple of the tag and css to use is set out below.

<div id=”heading1″><h1 class=”heading1style”>Search Engine Optimisation</h1></div>

The CSS element would be -  

 #heading1 {
 margin-top: 4px;
 margin-left: 5px;
 width: 500px;
 height: 25px;
 float: left;
}

.heading11style {font-size: small; color: #666; margin:2px; font-weight:100;
}

You can change the elements within the CSS to set out the div and the styling for the H1.