At the University of Connecticut, undergraduate students majoring in Computer Science studied Google’s PageRank algorithm as a practice on stochastic processes and their applications. After their research on the algorithm along with other search techniques that Google uses to rank websites, they have come up with some cool, and easy-to-implement, tips for website owners to organically increase their website rank. As the TA for that class, I felt thrilled with their awesome submissions and wanted to share some of their work on this study.

42 tips to increase your website’s rank based on understanding Google’s PageRank

1. “One of the things search engines look for when ranking websites is how many other websites link to it. So if you can, host content that people are likely to share with others. Original images that don’t exist elsewhere on the internet are a good thing to have – a unique image allows your website to compete against others that DON’T have that image.”– Adam Claxton and Connor Jackson
2. “If you’d like your website to show up in Google searches, make sure your title has relevant keywords in its title.  If you make sure a given page’s title has keywords relevant to the content on the page, then it will be more likely to turn up in Google searches.  Just make sure you don’t load your webpages with unnecessary keywords or your website will get penalized for it in regards to ranking.”– Vincent Chov and Siena Biales
3. “In order to increase your website’s popularity connect your site to the varieties of social media. This will provide publicity and increase the trail left behind to your site.”– Geoffrey Cheng and Amy Franzis
4. “Make sure to keep your website “fresh” with new pages and content. Search engines place a higher value on websites that consistently update themselves, especially sites that have to do with current events or trends.”– Alicia Affinito and Tom Smith-LaFemina
5. “One good way to improve your web ranking on Google is to have your website available in different languages. This will allow your website to have a larger audience, increasing web traffic to the site, and therefore its popularity, increasing its ranking.” – David Engel & Nathan Ramdial
6. “One tip that I recommend for people trying to get a good page rank on Google is to make the website for the users not the search engine.  By following this rule you would set a precedent of your website to not be deceiving to users. This will allow current users to link your trusted websites to others and eventually expand to more unique viewers overtime visiting your website.” – Ramy Nouh and Ivan Peng
7. “Nowadays, people use their mobile phones as often as their laptops. Make sure your website is compatible with any type of device. Being user friendly makes people want to stay longer and revisit in the future!” – Dillon McManus
8. “Follow Google’s guides to creating the highest quality page that has a large E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) score. With those three things, not only will your website attract more users, but will also improve becoming first on google’s search results.” – Allen Pham and Kevin Foley
9. “As a webmaster, it is necessary to maintain the website being secured by adopting an updated framework, and monitor the materials to be safe and clean to the site users so as to increase the website rank, especially in Google safe search result.”– Nancy Cheng and Tsan Man LEE
10. “In order to increase your websites rank in Google searches, it’s essential to create original content. Google is able to determine whether or not your information is simply a duplicate or similar to the content of another website. By creating your own content you better ensure that your website appears first in Google search results.”  – Erik Green
11. “It is important to have a URL that contains keywords that are related to your site. The domain name is particularly important because the Google search algorithm places the most emphasis on this portion of the URL. Having keywords that are highly specific will increase your website’s chances of standing out among the search results.” – Lu Li and Jessica Li
12. “Websites that organize and present information that is useful, unique, and relevant to the user will help their sites appear first in Google’s search results. More specifically, the website should provide helpful material that truly adds value to the web, and does not duplicate, or contain redundant articles on topics that already exist.” – Vijay Bala & Taylor Gamache
13. “The metadata of your website contributes greatly to your Google search ranking. Make sure that your website’s metadata properly and efficiently conveys the title of your website, a description of your website, and relevant keywords that people might use to find your website.” – Matt Arnold and Ryan Mack
14. “One key factor is to ensure that your web page is being indexed by the Google’s index which can be determined by searching site:www.yourdomain.org.  If you are not included in this index then an important factor is to submit your site to the search engines or more efficiently get sites that are already indexed to be linked to your based on relevant and associated material.” – Shane Keney
15. “First identify keywords for which you would like your web page to be found.  The next step and the key to making a web page rank higher in a Google search is to repeat these key words multiple times.  Also using these key words in prime locations will help the page be found by Google searches.” – Kevin Loureiro and Andre Tremblay
16. “Make sure your web page contains content that directly answers likely questions from Google users. While keywords are clearly useful in generating hits, Google is becoming more and more conversational, especially with the increasing use of microphones to verbally enter searches. By including content on your web page that provides better answers to possible questions than competing sites, you are increasing your chances of climbing the Google search ranks.” – Bryant Molloy and Thomas Landry
17. “If your website represents a local business or attraction make sure it has accurate geographical location as content and in metadata!  Google’s Pigeon Algorithm update focuses on locality and increases the rank of nearest business websites to promote local business and provide convenience to the searcher.” – Mike Neas and Ted Jensen
18. “Make sure that your website is mobile friendly. When searching for something on a mobile device, Google ranks the websites that have the most mobile friendly website. Therefore, it would be beneficial to improve and update your website in order to rise in the ranks.” – Roberto Gentile and Kyle Gain
19. “One way Google Search determines freshness is from the amount of time a visitor spends on your website. By consistently creating more pages and links within your website, you are not only changing your content, which itself helps to maintain a higher rank, but also likely increasing the time users spend there.” – Nick Barber
20. “For website owners with multiple pages on the web, be sure to create links to and from each page. This will increase the page rank for all of your pages, allowing them to be more easily seen by the public.” – Jack Bonadies
21. “It is important to describe your business on the webpage domain owned by the business. Since users may not know or remember your business’ name having all the appropriate keywords located on your domain will provide a bigger net to catch potential clients. Also, put the business’ name on the domain.” – Gavin Li
22. “From my previous experience with web development here are some of the major tips i used to maximize search page results: – make the domain name as close as possible to your most relevant key word. – make page links SEO friendly (site.com/2016-toys vs site.com/page-1 or site.com/asp?=1). – Add relevant meta data to every page/post as well as a crawl-access for every page. – use RSS feeds and accumulate as many back links as you can.” – Besard Gjoni,Daniel Demarco
23. “Try and get larger known websites to link to your website. Remove profanity or anything that can be construed as pornography from your website. Link to places that are visited by the demographic you are trying to target with your website.” – Erica Ballas and Jeremy Mill
24. “The tip I would say is to make sure that you page is well optimized for the synonym keywords. If it isn’t, your page will lose a lot of SEO visibility and traffic.” – Craig Goyette and Lauren Biernacki
25. “By setting up your website to use the free Google Analytics product, you can see the search traffic that brought users to your page through the Search Console module. The Search Console data helps find optimizations for your site’s content by informing you of your top pages and search queries as well as performing error checks for your site and URLs.” – Tyler Southmayd
26. “One suggestion for getting your website to be a top Google search result is to continue creating new pages for your website instead of just updating old ones. Google keeps track of when it crawled your website, not when it was last updated, so you will want to make new pages to help your page appear higher in the ranks. Google keeps its search results fresh by looking for newly published pages.” – Dylan Mousch and James Park
27. “Here are some ways to rank better among Google’s crawlers: 1. Use commonly searched and relevant keywords in headers for your page. 2. Use descriptions in image links (since text in images is not parsed). 3. Update the page regularly with new content.”  – Jonathan Huang and Jordan Force
28. “One manner of improving your PageRank is to add pages to your site and to swap links with sites that already have a highPageRank  It also helps to have meaningful content on your site that will actually attract visitors and have them wanting to come back and visit in the future.” – Amadeusz Nasuta
29. “In general, it’s very difficult to game Google’s system!  They’ve spent billions of dollars on algorithms to prevent exactly that.  The best way to increase visibility is to attract user and media attention, often by advertising on already popular sites.  The more people talking about and linking to your site, the better.” – Josh Eller
30. “For your website to rank higher: 1) You can ask a blogger to review to your product and attach a link to your website. Remember a link from a well-known website like Recode is equivalent to a 100 link from lesser known sites. 2) Make your website presence on major social platforms like starting a Facebook page, Twitter handle, Quora presence, etc.” – Nihar Devineni and Daljit Sharma
31. “Releasing large amounts of new content will increase your freshness rating more than small amounts. Adding advertisements and other non-content will not help your freshness rating as much as original content.” – William Lukaszewski
32. “When you update your website, ensure that there is a significant change with fresh, new content. Small edits (like changing a few words, reformatting, adding content in an invisible font, etc) or reposting something already published online will not be considered “fresh” content. Newer information and updates rank higher than older posts on the subject, but the information must be meaningful and relevant.” – Maegan Dyakiw and John Costa
33. “One of the requirements that Google takes into consideration when ranking websites is the page speed. Google use a metric called Page Speed Score, thus the fastest receive more scores. So make your website as fast as possible and do not forget the quality.” – Bruna Siqueira
34. “One thing that could help a business is keeping an up-to-date social media presence and Wikipedia page. Google algorithms can relate items to businesses and having this presence with relevant information helps ensure there is data for Google to pull and relate to.” – Brianna Boyce
35. “Today, Googles algorithms care less about keywords and aim more to understand a query in the context it was asked, which often means trying to answer a search users question. Brainstorm questions people might be asking about your site or industry and make sure your websites content clearly answers these questions in a way easily understood and picked out by a search engine.”– Michael Wicks, Anders Fogelberg
36. “Make up cleaver keywords for subdomains, URL links, and place them in the headers of different pages on the website in a way that they match Google most searched terms. Market the website by using free available services like social media, blogs, wikipedia, and any other popular website.”– Ayham Chalghin and Azm Siddiqui
37. “Here are 3 tips to improve ranking the rank: 1. improve the number of incoming links. if there are more links pointed to this web the larger the Rank number. 2. catch the keywords that mostly used by user who search the context related to your web site. 3.choose appropriate domain name and insert suitable image can also improve the rank.” – Linfei Xie
38. “Make sure to keep your website updated and introduce new content every once in a while. Keeping a website updated can be an arduous task, but an easy way to do so is to build in a blogging or news system, or both, allowing for easy page updates. A comments section where users can provide feedback will also “update” the page, contributing to the “freshness” of that page.” – Aaron Huang and John Bojorquez
39. “Capitalize on social networks by utilizing them actively and having links to your website on each as a way to spread backlinks among a large number of viewers, as well as sharing/posting/tweeting/etc links to specific content on your website. Take it a step further by adding simple click share icons to relevant content on your website, such as a blog post, so that viewers can easily share and link to your website, further spreading the number of backlinks.” – Rhyza Velasco
40. “Make sure Google can easily crawl your website so it can accurately assess your site’s quality and relationship to a search query. Optimize site structure with silos, targeted pages, and internal links. Add alt tags or captions to every image so Google can index them.” – Andrew Schaffer
41. “I would recommend social media as the best way to get your name out there, create a Facebook page and invite everyone to like it and follow it. The more social media pages your website has the better chances to appear on the top suggested list of Google’s pagerankalgorithm. Social media is a powerful tool nowadays and might as well use it to our advantage in a positive way.”– Alvaro Goyzueta
42. “Our tip to website owners would be to keep your website fresh with content, regularly adding new pages as well as updating older ones.” – Salman Kaleem and Samah Saeed

What do you think one action you will take immediately based on the above tips to rank your website higher? Share with us in the comments ..

– Note: all the tips here were shared with students’ agreement.