Things That Help Your Page Rank and Things That Hurt Your Page Rank

Things That Help Page Rank:

These factors will probably change over time, once someone figures how to "beat the system". Some these variables are more important than others:

• Keywords in the title tag
• Keywords in the description tag
• Keywords in the keywords tag
• Changing and increasing content
• Keywords in your headlines
• Keywords in your content
• Keywords in the top 25% of the page
• Keywords in the bottom 25% of the page
• Using HTML emphasis on Keywords (Bold, Italics, Underline et cetera)
• Incoming link popularity - if sites that point to you have a high PR it is a good thing
• Keywords in the names of linked pages Cover Hypnosis Expert Kevin Hogan is better than Kevin Hogan and the actual site name has the lowest value (but better than nothing)
• Keywords in alt tags and as names of images
• Getting listings in Pay-Per-Click search engines like Google Adwords or in Overture
• Listings in directories

Things That Hurt Page Rank:

• Spamming by using the same word or phrase several times in your title, meta tags, or text. Buy you new shoes from our shoe site by visiting our shoe forum and choosing from our shoe gallery! The sentence might be readable, but it is spam.
• Keyword density over 5% which may be considered keyword spamming.
• Spamming by putting words or phrases into your meta tags or title that have nothing to do with the actual content people see on your web page.
• Too many outbound links, even if they are to sites related to your topic. If you want to have hundreds of links, make a link page.
• Using text the same color as the background. Years ago, I could not figure why I landed on a site that had nothing to do with my search.
• Using tiny text (font size "-1" or smaller) as a way to cram keywords into a page
• Linking out to link farms or free-for-all (FFA) link pages.
• Links coming in from link farms or FFA link pages
• Linking out to sites that have nothing to do with the focus or niche of your site (For a class Kevin Hogan gave in 2006 he linked from KevinHogan.com to everyone that attended his class, causing his PR to drop one point.)
• Unknown. Since we don't know the actual algorithm used there may be things that we don't know that hurt your page rank. If you think something may hurt your site, don't do it.

Follow these basic rules and you will be on your way to getting your page ranked properly.

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