What is a good term for a search on Google?

Ranking for a specific term on Google search engine

• I would like our website to rank higher for the search term "automation" on the Google search engine. Our URL is www.atsautomation.com, our business is industrial automation. We rank about # 68 on Google and on MSN we rank #1 (for search term automation). I understand that automation is a very broad term. I see many other sites ranking higher for this term than ours. The word automation in many of our pages, it is even in the URL, meta tags, and ATS has a healthy number of links-in. Traffic to the ATS site is healthy, although we do not update as often as I would like. Question, why are we not ranking as high as we could be ? What specifically can we do - that we have not already done, to rank higher vs. our competitors (especially those sites which are ranking in postion # 8, 9, 10) etc? What are they doing correct compared to our website. And are there any technical reasons (Re: our site) that may be holding us back from achieving this target ? Jberetta

• Answer:

  Hi Jim, Good day and thanks for your question. The good news is that your site is up to #61 from #68. The most burning issue in the world of Search Engine Optimization is - how do I rank higher on google? People come up with methods that 'trick' the googlebot, but Google responds strongly to counter those tricks. I advise you not to try any of those tricks. Also, don't approach people who say that they will guarantee a #1 position on Google. Those things either don't work or work for maximum, a month. The Google algorithm changes frequently (I've been researching a bit on the methodologies used - I even got my site to #1 for a very common keyword, only to see it knocked down to 38 in it's next index). Furthermore, resorting to means like cloaking, keyword spamming etc. could see the end of your listing on google. Getting re-instated is not as easy as getting indexed, which itself is hard enough. I will present a small analysis of the top 10 sites for "automation" and how they are there. This will be followed by my suggestions as far as your site is concerned. ATS Automation - http://www.atsautomation.com/ Pagerank: 6/10 Inward links: 256 Pages indexed: 352 #1 -- Rockwell Automation - http://www.rockwell.com/ & http://www.rockwellautomation.com Pagerank: 7/10 Number of inward links (pages that link to the site): 2,940 Number of site pages indexed on Google: 15,400 #2 -- Smarthome - http://www.smarthome.com Pagerank: 6/10 Inward links: 1,240 Pages indexed: 8,270 #3 -- Home-Automation - http://www.home-automation.org/ Pagerank: 7/10 Inward Links: 110 Pages Indexed: 61 #4 -- Rockwell automation - refer to #1 #5 -- The ABB Group - http://www.abb.com/ Pagerank: 8/10 Inward Links: 1,370 Pages Indexed: 17,000 #6 -- http://www.homeauto.com/ Pagerank: 6/10 Inward Links: 141 Pages indexed: 560 #7 -- IEEE Robotics and Automation Society - http://www.ncsu.edu/IEEE-RAS/ Pagerank: 7/10 Inward Links: 310 Pages indexed: 450 #8 -- 40th DAC Home - http://www.dac.com Pagerank: 8/10 Inward Links: 814 Pages indexed: 3,520 #9 -- Scientific Computing & Instrumentation Online - http://www.scamag.com Pagerank: 7/10 Inward Links: 219 Pages indexed: 108 * I couldn't access the site as it was giving a HTTP 500 Internal Server error. #10 --- Managing Automation: The technology guide for manufacturing - http://www.managingautomation.com/ Pagerank: 7/10 Inward Links: 157 Pages indexed: 206 As you can see from the above, high ranked sites have a lot of inward links. It's no big secret that the best way of moving up the google rankings is to have a lot of people linking to you. The logic is like this. The googlebot crawls a page and stores it's links for it's next crawl. Seems easy...but it isn't. The pagerank of the sites linking to your site is also taken into account. That explains why #7, #9 & #10 have high ranks despite a relatively small number of inward links. Most of the inward links to these sites are from the .edu domain, which are known to have high pageranks. One way of getting your site linked to, is to see who have linked to the top 10 sites. To do this, you have to type the URL into the Google search box and click on the "Google Search" button. In the resulting screen, you will see a line like this : Find web pages that link to <website address> Click on 'link'. A list of all the webpages and websites linking to that particular address will be displayed. You can email the webmasters of the various pages requesting them to link to your site. Most of them will expect a link in return. Be prepared for that. Also, the word used to link to your site is also considered. For example, if the text conatining the link is "automation", then it is considered as related to the search. Also, when you request webmasters to link to your site, ask them to specify the link text as "ATS Automation" or "ATS-Automation". In the next paragraph, I will explain why it is important to separate the words You may probably be wondering why home-automation.org has a high ranking. Basically, it contains the word automation. You may argue that your domain also contains that word. However, home-automation is hyphenated and is considered as two different words (home & automation). Search for home-automation on google and you'll understand. If you maintain the exact same content, ats-automation.com will fetch a higher ranking that atsautomation.com, as atsautomation is considered as one word. Another good source of incoming links are from pages on your site itself. I've gone through your website and noticed that not all pages link back to the home page. Furthermore, the link is in the form of <a href="/index.htm">. Change the link to either <a href="/"> or <a href="http://www.atsautomation.com">. I also notice you have the tag <meta NAME="REVISIT-AFTER" CONTENT="4 weeks">. Although I am not sure whether googlebot follows this or not, I suggest you remove it. Why would you want to restrict the frequency of visits of a search engine robot/spider? Frequently updated sites are given a higher ranking as it is considered to be more related than others. Introduce the ALT field in the <IMG> tag. Also, name images with the word "automation", but remember try to put an underscore to separate the word "automation" eg. automation_of_machine.jpg instead of automationofmachine.jpg. Don't blindly go about naming *all* images with the word automation. Name only the related ones. If it's possible, try to add as many pages as possible, but maintain the quality of the site. Do these and watch your site's rank increase! If you have any clarifications, please don't hesitate to ask Thank you for using this service and have a nice day. Regards, aditya2k