Getting Google PageRank Fast

Caveat: This article is experiential not certain fact.

Many new websites are launched that are for short-term campaigns, events or other reasons that may be short-lived or otherwise legitimately wish to appear high in Google search results within a short period of time. I had that need and this post is some thinking on strategies deployed to get results. I will follow-up with some analysis of the effectiveness of these approaches in a future post.

In short, no one outside Google (or for that matter plenty inside) really know how search positioning works to a mathematical certainty. There are plenty of 'experts' who can help you, but most of their knowledge comes from a combination of fact, assumed fact and observation (experience). I am not going into basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in this post other than to say the following ...

The best way to get strong search results in Google is to do all three of the following (don't leave any out) ...

1) Produce good relevant content - not only does this help with search by providing the 'context' or content for the search, but it also means your site will be consumed once discovered.

2) Get other quality sites to link to you - they should be relevant to you and promote your site. Links to you give your page(s) importance in Google's calculations (a factor known as PageRank) but equally important the links will deliver traffic to your site in their own right.

3) Spend some money with Google on Adwords – advertising your site, even for as little as a dollar per day will deliver traffic, gives you a paid listing and amazingly has a positive effect on your general (organic) search listing as well.

My requirement for a quick result
On 13 October 2008, I will deliver a presentation on web marketing strategy to delegates from Clubs in NSW, Australia at the Clubs NSW annual conference. Like many industry groups, there are a broad cross-section of organizations from small and struggling to large and successful. Clubs are not renown for their use of the web to meet contemporary operational objectives.

My aim is to produce a demonstration site, basically a pretend club called 'Dragon Club' that utilizes good web strategy to gain attention and in this case promote the benefits of clubs collectively. I had less than two weeks to get this new site embedded within the internet landscape to a point that it out performed the majority of club websites that have been on the web for years.

Actions

Planting a flag – First things first, I needed a domain. On day one, we registered www.dragonclub.com.au and set up email accounts. The email accounts are needed for other services described later, so the order of activity is important.

Site deployment – At the same time, I provided a brief on the design of the site. It would however be some days before the design process went through its paces (concept, review, refinement, finalization, preparation). Normally we could wait, but this is the story of moving quickly, so we posted a single page of text as content ahead of the full site. I am fortunate to have a CMS platform in my 'back-pocket' and this was deployed with the initial home page text on day one - you could use our CMS or simply do this as HTML.

Getting hooked-in – Still within the first day (hour really), the site was registered with Google (from Google home page, go to 'About Google', then 'Submit your content to Google', and finally 'Add your URL' or even better follow the 'Here's how to get started' list). You can also submit your URL to Microsoft (MSN) under the webmaster options and to Yahoo (Yahoo make you signup - not sure why, as it is a pain and most people would do so further into the service offerings anyway - not really appropriate when just flagging a URL for search inclusion in my opinion). I am sure there are more registration points but Google, MSN and Yahoo are enough for me at this stage.

Confirming results – Simply flagging your URL is not really enough. In the Google galaxy, you need to consider Adwords, Analytics and broader web master tools. Using the email account set-up for the Dragon Club site, I registered for a Google Account, set up Google Analytics. This includes dropping some lines of code into your site (again a spot where a search friendly CMS comes in handy - making this a ten-second job). Analytics will let me see how the site performs - not much use in doing all this work if I can't measure the results.

Helping Google help me – Next step, using the new Google account was to register for the webmaster tools, this includes providing an XML sitemap (again inbuilt into the CMS - otherwise it requires some more coding), general site verification (by meta tag or HTML page) and setting some other preferences, including my page weightings to let Google know which pages I want it to focus on (easy choice with only one page so far - well, actually seven if I include the XML Sitemap, Public Sitemap, Search, Google HTML verification page, CMS login, CMS logout - and that's not including the CMS itself - a lot of infrastructure for a single page. Better make this site bigger to justify all this overhead ;-) There are similar web master tools in the MSN galaxy - again more code required (another home page meta tag, unless your CMS does this for you as well). As you can see without automation in a web publishing system, this work could have taken much longer that the couple of hours I spent getting set-up on the first day.

Getting serious with search – My final step for Day 1 was to set up Google Adwords and register some key words. The process is relatively straight-forward, but worth having someone who knows the ropes show you and give you set-up advice. There is plenty of online support, but the whole marketing field can make for a relatively complex scenario after all. Thankfully I had been through the learning curve before. My strategy was to set a low limit, a few dollars per day and then select adwords that were directly and indirectly related to Clubs in NSW that I could get on Page 1 of the paid results by spending only a few cents per click. Not many of these words have paid advertisers, so this was relatively easy - sorry for any of you in more competitive online environments. Nevertheless, even a low spend that doesn't show on Page 1 will give you net benefits to other search results (and won't cost you much). For now I settled with just getting a few dozen words included to get the ball rolling, the plan being to go back every couple of days and finesse the arrangement and find some more good key words. Keep your Google ad (three short lines of text) concise, to the point and compelling for people interested in what you have to click on - after all the aim is to get them to your site from a source where only your position and your message can distinguish you.

Incoming links – For many sites, this is one of the harder objectives to achieve but probably the most important. Working in the web publishing area is an advantage here, allowing me to quickly put a few links on other relevant web publishing and demonstration sites and point them at the Dragon Club site. These other sites have modest PageRank, but hey, every bit counts and they will still deliver some traffic in their own right. If you can get a 'big hitter' web site to link to you - do it as fast as you can - as long as the link is legitimate and relevant (link farming and link sharing is a bad idea - even if you get away with it in relation to Google PageRank, the traffic that finds your site will be annoyed that it is not relevant and meaningful for them). There are plenty of places to embed links to your site, a good place to start is the Open Directory Project of Google (see www.dmoz.org) - find the right category for your site and then send for inclusion. Look for industry groups and other directory listings as a good starting place. The more incoming links your site has, the more traffic, the higher the PageRank for search and the more other indexes will pick up your link themselves. Popularity is the key to more popularity on the web (as in life I guess).

So where is the site after two days ...

Going back to the three required items – content, links and advertising. Dragon Club had its content coming soon in the form of a completed site design - in the meantime, I had to give it enough content to provide some context for search outcomes. Links had been created in enough places to give PageRank inheritance and drive some early traffic (more to be added) - the most interesting thing will be to see how quickly this gets traction. In addition advertising has been set-up at low cost through Google Adwords again to drive traffic and commence the search improvement process.

In the short-time remaining before the conference the aim will be to maximise these outcomes and monitor the Analytics results. I also have a few theories to test on the types of content and types of links that will get noticed by site crawlers (search engine robots) faster. I intend to change some content every day to also ensure that the robots do not think the site is static and flag it for more frequent review.

I will let you know how Dragon Club gets on.

Regards,

David