So how did this page get to the top of the results for your search? Just getting found by Google is pretty simple. The difficult bit is making sure your site appears somewhere near the top of the search engine results. So how do you make it happen?
Submit your site
Submitting your site is more or less a mechanical activity and you don’t need to spend any money on this. Google will come round and index your website within a few days of it appearing without you raising a finger. You can speed it up by telling Google you’re there. Search engines have a page where you can submit the details of your site to them.
There are also techniques for telling Google (and some others) that there is new content on your site. Google offers to read an xml file called a sitemap that you can create with your new content in. Websites that we build come with that sitemap file as standard. It will ensure Google has the latest information about your site within a day or do of it appearing. Other search engines will have something similar, if not now then during the course of 2007.
You’ll notice I haven’t referred to paying anyone to submit your details to one or more search engines. If the search engine can’t find you in the first place without prompting, I would question the effectiveness of the search engine! There is no need to pay for this service these days. Just letting Google, Yahoo and MSN LiveSearch know about you covers most bases in any case.
Search engine ranking
Search engine ranking is a different game altogether. Here we will describe easy steps you can take to maximise your ranking. We’ll also describe the other more indirect ways in which search engines rank sites, and consider how you can influence those as well.
How does Google work?
First of all, let’s take Google. It’s the most important of the “crawler” search engines. It continually sends its robots out and about on the internet seeking out sites and identifying links between them. As robots go, they aren’t all that clever and can understand only plain text. They don’t know about pictures, videos, flash movies, graphics, music or any of the other things that seem to make life fun on the internet. If all you have on site is pictures then Google will struggle to index it. And if you aren’t indexed, you might as well not exist.
They do however know all about HTML which is the language your web designer uses to get your website out there.
Here’s how to talk to your web designer
The first thing to look out for is does your designer know about HTML and search engines? Have they set the pages up so that important information like your company name is held as an important heading (H1 in the jargon) and sub headings in H2, H3 and so on.
Next, does the designer know about how important the title attribute is? If so, that’s great and you’re one step ahead of the game. However if they are still building your site exclusively in, say, Photoshop or Flash you’ll have a problem – the site will look cool but Google won’t know anything about what’s in it. Go talk to your designer.
If your designer starts telling you about metatags and how it’s all under control, then you really have a problem. Come and talk to us instead.
What are you writing about?
Before we go any further, let’s consider the content of your web pages. Since web search engines will index your website on the basis of the words it contains, it makes sense to use words on your pages that reflect what you do. Is that too basic? OK, let’s get a touch more sophisticated. If you identify up to 10 words that reflect what you’re about and use those words often throughout your site, when people go searching for those words, you stand a good chance of being in the list of results. Those words are called “keywords”.
Actually there’s a bit more to it than this. You need to promote words that other people will use when they are searching for your type of service or business. You need to choose words that other sites are less likely to select for themselves. Clearly there’s a tension between these two directives! Pick the wrong words and the right people won’t find you, and wrong people will. Result: you’ll all be unhappy.
Where to put those keywords
This is where those keywords should go:
In the title tag. Your web designer needs to be in on this one. The title is what appears at the top of the browser when you load your site. This should be the title of the current page, or some other text that reflects what’s on the page. Get your web designer on the case – this one’s important. The designer also needs to make sure the title is different for each page in the website so Google doesn’t just assume you have loads of pages all the same.
In the meta tags? Don’t bother! Another one for your designer. You may have heard how if you put all your keywords into the meta tags on your web page, that’s all you need to do for search engines. Not true! Google for one ignores them although some of the others still use them. The one meta tag to fill in is the description. Most search engines use at least part of the description meta tag in the phase displayed underneath the title in their results so it makes sense to write a decent short description in the relevant meta tag.
Current opinions on search engines agree that its probably not worth spending time creating new meta tags other than the description. If this is all your designer is offering, then again you have a real problem. Come and talk to us instead.
In the main heading. This is the H1 element in your web page. Again talk to your web designer about how to get your company name into this element. Google takes H1 content very seriously indeed. With your name in H1 when people go looking for you, they’ll more than likely find you. In the sub headings. The same goes for H2 and H3, only less so. It’s still important to make sure the headings in your site contain your keywords whenever possible. Using these elements means that what’s in them is important to your site, and so important to Google. If you’re using a content management system or a weblog, make sure your article headings use your keywords.
Keywords in your content
Now for ordinary content. The keywords are mighty important here as well. Make sure you include them in your text especially in the first 250 words of your pages. The higher up the page, the more important Google thinks they are and the more priority it will place on them. Don’t just stuff all those words in any old way – Google’s pretty smart at spotting when you’re trying to fool the robots and may blacklist the page if it thinks you’re cheating. So no invisible text or lists of words – you run the risk of being ignored by Google with this approach.
Indirect tactics
This is just the start. Google reckoned that the prize for getting to the top of a search engine results was so big that people would be tempted to cheat. Google has developed a couple of other ways of ranking pages over which you only have indirect influence.
Inbound links
Google rates pages that other sites link to more highly than pages which have no links from elsewhere. So, if thirty or forty other websites think so highly of you that they have a link to you on their pages, your site will figure higher in Google’s popularity polls than that sad site that no one links to.
This is quite a subtle measure. It means that you have to persuade other people of the value of your content, and they have to prove it by linking to you. It’s an indication of popularity, authority, walking the talk; it means you’re recognised. Isn’t this what your website was for in the first place? What it really means is that you have to write compellingly about what matters to you and your readers. It also means you have to keep the content coming. It’s no good just writing a site and letting it sit there – there’s no value in it to most people. Keep it current.
Even better, the better the sites that link to you, the more highly rated will be your page. So get the BBC to link to your website and your visitor counters will go into overdrive, both from the BBC and from Google.
Outbound links
The search engines reckon if your site has links to lots of other sites it must itself be fairly important and “authoritative”. You’ll get a higher rating for that. So include lots of links to other websites, especially sites that are themselves influential.
Traffic counters
The third thing Google does is to counter the possibility of click cliques forming – groups of friends endlessly promoting each others’ sites. Google counts the number of visits to your page from other links. If the number of visits is less than the keyword count and the link count suggests it should be, Google will down rate your results.
This last one really means you have to keep your visitors ticking over. You need to be attracting new visitors and repeat visitors. Since there’s a limit to the number of people you can bribe, this definitely means you have to have an interesting site. And you definitely have to market the site as widely as possible.
Get writing!
How we can help
Features to help you achieve all of this are built into Nick Prior Designs websites. Our websites are set up to use HTML to its fullest potential, and we’ll educate you in how best to create the compelling content you visitors will like. Come and talk to us and see how we can help you get found when Google comes a’knocking.