Controlling your ranking flow for more profits.
Posted in Articles on 03/04/2010 11:35 pm by Guest AuthorIn my last post I had a section regarding on page SEO and in particular some information on controlling how ranking is passed from a website. I have decided to do a post on the importance of controlling your ranking flow to increase your affiliate money income ten fold.
The ranking or authority of a website is determined on such aspects as popularity of the website (amount of traffic), number of income links and their quality, number of pages and on page SEO factors. Before I carry on, when I talk about ranking I am not referring to google page ranking, I am referring to the general ranking of a website for all search engines.
As all search engines have their own algorithm’s for ranking websites and unfortunately they don’t share that with the general public, it is impossible to determine exactly how website ranking is worked out. The only thing that is known for certain is onpage SEO, incoming links and amount of pages of a website, play a big part in a websites ranking.
The ranking of a website is probably the most valuable asset to a site owner, it can mean the difference between making a fortune on the Internet or just making some pocket change. Why is it so important? Well the ranking determines where a website is displayed in the search engines, a better ranking equals better placement and in turn better placement equals more clicks.
Like I explained in the previous post, imagine a website main webpage is a bucket which is filled with ranking from SEO effects and there are holes at the bottom of the bucket were the ranking flows out. As ranking is such a valuable asset it’s wise to direct the ranking to were you want it to go by blocking off those holes were the rankings not needed. I am talking about such pages as contact us, terms and condition, disclaimer, category pages, terms of use and pages along those lines. As those kind of pages are designed to improve the customer experience they won’t need SEO on them, so why waste the precious ranking on them.
The two methods I am going to use to control the ranking flow on my website are the html statement ‘nofollow’ and robots.txt. Both of these methods are very simple but very powerful in helping search engines figure out how you want them to see your website and were to direct the ranking.
The ‘nofollow’ statement tells the search engine to ignore the link it is associated with and not to pass any ranking through it. It was first created to help tackle spam comments on blogs but was quickly taken up by website owners when it became common knowledge that it was significant in controlling the flow of ranking on a website.
robots.txt is used to control the spiders that visit a website. A large part of a website traffic comes from programs called spiders, these spiders are used by thousands of companies for many different reasons on the Internet. So if a website is just left open for spiders they can eat up the bandwidth, slow a site down, look at and log information which a site owner may not want to publish and at the very worse mess up a site completely. How does robots.txt help with ranking control? Well it can be used to block off areas of a website were site owners don’t want the spiders to go and by doing so stops the flow of ranking to those areas.
The two methods above are not difficult to implement and are a good way to control the flow of ranking on a website, yet so many website owners overlook this when designing their sites. Having the power to shift ranking around a website will enable a site owner to rank the pages of their choosing with a lot less work and hassle.