Google Juice - Hard to Get But Tasty To Drink!!

What is Google juice anyway?

If you’ve been blogging for a while I am pretty sure you are not new to this term. For everyone else, I’ll take a few words to explain what it is and how to get it to save you valuable time and several hours of study and research.

In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, Google Juice is a term which means the unique visitors coming to your website from search engines (primarily Google, because of its domination in Search Engine market). This is also known as organic traffic which only stops by if your website is optimized for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Importance of Google Juice

The more you get, the better it is for you. As per a research done by forrester.com, 80% of Internet users find websites by searching for keywords on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, Ask etc. and it’s really important that your web pages are listed in the results. If for a particular search term, pages from your website are listed on the first page of the search results then you are going to have loads of visitors stopping by on your website if they are looking for that search term or related stuff.

Pages from your websites stand a chance of getting some visitors even if they are listed on the second or even third page of the search results. Otherwise you shouldn’t (actually, you can’t!) expect significant traffic coming in from Search Engines unless the person who’s looking for something is patient enough to dig a couple of pages of search results for some search term.

How well are you ranked in Search Engines?

Technically speaking what makes your web-presence known is by your search engine ranks. Simply put, how well you are known online is determined by the rank your website enjoys in search engine. Page Rank (PR) by Google is one such important metric assigned to websites listed in Google Search Results which web-masters and advertisers often use to judge the quality of a website. The higher it is (on a scale of 10), the better a website is considered and the higher it is listed in Google Search Engine Results. Obviously, it enjoys more Google Juice than lower ranked websites.

Get listed in Google within 30 minutes

All those SEO and Make Money Online websites next door will try to show you ways to scale the first page of Search Engine results once you’re listed but what they won’t tell you is how to get listed in Google search results within 30 minutes!

We’ll consider scaling the front page of search results in a later post in SEO series but right now concentrate on how to get your web pages listed so soon.

This post is the first part of this series (Get Listed in Google within 30 minutes) and will be focused on websites and blogs built with WordPress as CMS. However, a lot of these tips apply to static websites as well. So, let’s start sharing best practices…

WordPress Plugins and SEO

With the popularity of WordPress and the contributions by the WP community, managing websites and implementing SEO has become a lot easier. There are various WordPress plug-ins that are available for SEO purposes but the 2 plug-ins I would like to recommend to you are:

1. Google XML Sitemaps
This plug-in will create a Google Sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your site map is updated and all major search engines that support the site map protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Once you activate this plug-in go to plug-in settings and create the sitemap for first time. You can see the output with this URI: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml. Now we have our sitemap ready so let’s tell Google about it. Type http://www.google.com/sitemaps in your browser and login with your Google ID and Password.

On this website you can submit your sitemap to Google and Google will start indexing your website. This process requires site verification where you need to add a Meta tag or upload an HTML file to your web server. It’s very easy to complete and you can get step by step instructions on Google website.

2. All in One SEO Pack
This plug-in optimizes your WordPress website/blog for Search Engines. It automatically optimizes page titles for search engines and generates META tags. This avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs. For WordPress 2.7 (the latest version) you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want while writing the posts or pages. You can fine-tune almost everything related to search engine optimization. To get most out of it, do a little keyword research for the content and use best keywords while writing the posts and pages.

Tomorrow, I will further dig into SEO stuff relating to getting listed in Google within 30 minutes of updating your blog/website. Next thing I’ll talk about is services that your WordPress can automatically ping and notify them about updated content. I’ll also tell you how to fine-tune your link structure (permalinks) as they are not very search engine friendly by default. Stay tuned…

UPDATE

This post was indexed within 8 minutes of being published, publish time was 16:02 and Google indexed this post at 16:10.  Check out the screenshot.

I am enjoying the Google Juice!!