Search engine optimisation is a complex topic and many people have devoted significant portions of their life to studying the complex algorithms that Google and the other search engines use to rank pages. This is a brief introductory article so we won’t go into too much detail – this article is intended for those who have recently set up a website and would like to know some of the basic tricks and techniques to increase Google rankings.
So without further ado, let’s get into the tips:
- First and foremost, build links. This was what put Google in the position they’re in today – they realised that the most reliable way to judge a site isn’t by what’s on it - that’s open to manipulation, the best way to judge a site is by how many independent websites link to it, what’s on those websites and what keywords they chose to link with – This system is called PageRank. There are many tactics for building links and how you do it will depend on your site, but a good start is to set up some links to complementary (not competing) websites and see if you can get them to link back to you. Building links is great for Google, but it’s also great for gaining traffic from the links themselves.
- Produce some content – if you offer a service, write some articles related to the service you’re providing (you can see this technique in action on this very page). This gives you the opportunity to create lots of pages for Google to index and fill them with keywords relevant to your site. Write things that are useful or interesting that might encourage others to link to you. Put links to other websites in your content where appropriate, see if you can build link networks with other content providers.
- Use CSS to order your HTML files so that the content comes at the beginning of the file, before any menus, navbars or adverts – even if this is not the way it should appear on the page. The first thing in your HTML file should be a heading (<h1>), followed by the actual content, and then after that should come any menus or navigational elements, and after that any adverts. Google does not render your pages, so if your menu comes before your content, Google will assume that your menu is more important than your content. It’s relatively easy to use CSS to override the order of the HTML file and position each element exactly where you want it irrespective of where it is in the HTML file.
- Determine the keywords that your customers are likely to put into a search engine and use them a few times throughout each of the relevant pages on your site. The higher up your page the better, this includes the page title and the address bar. The most important places you can put keywords are the page title, the URL and the first heading (hint, use <h1>). If you have articles with different titles, use the title of the article in the <title> tag – don’t just use the same title for every page.
- You can get keyword ideas using one of the online keyword suggestion tools, Google’s is here, Yahoo (Overture’s) is here. You could also try these keyword tools from third party providers (although they mostly rely on the data from Google and Overture, they often display it in a more helpful way). SeoBook, WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery.
- If there is one specific keyword or phrase that’s particularly relevant you may try registering it as a domain name. For example at Digital Crocus we would love to get our hands on webhosting.com, web-hosting.com, virtual-private-servers.com or something similar; unfortunately for us none of these domains are available, but they may be for you. Google will usually rank you higher in keyword searches if the keyword actually appears in your domain name.
- Consider registering your domain for more than the minimum number of years – this shows that your site is here to stay. Some spammers and scammers will register many different domain names for the minimum period possible and once their domain is blocked or banned they allow it to expire and move onto a new one. Registering your domain for longer is an easy way to indicate to Google that you’re serious about your website and it could well gain you a few easy points in the search engine rankings.
- Make your URLs search engine friendly; if you use a database driven website your pages may have URLs like this: http://yourdomain.com/directory/phpscript.php?section=962452&page=662342. This may be the easiest way to reference the ID numbers of rows in your database, but it doesn’t exactly contain many keywords. Not only that, but there’s a risk Google may think that your PHP script is part of an interactive web application rather than a page displaying content and only index a limited number of the pages, or worse, not index it at all. The Digital Crocus knowledgebase is a database driven system, but notice how the URLs all contain the title of the article – the ID numbers are there too at the beginning of the file name but it’s a lot friendlier than the example above. We achieve this effect using mod_rewrite although this can be a bit scary for the novice user. If you run an out-of-the-box software solution on your website, you may find that there is a plugin for friendly URLs – this is particularly true of blogging software. Consult your specific system’s documentation and plugin list for further details.
- If you run a blog, try to build a network of links with other bloggers – many blogs have links to their friends’ blogs on their navigation bars. Add a similar list to your blog and see if you can get your friends to link to your blog from theirs.
- If you don’t run a blog, consider starting one – blogs don’t have to be personal diaries, you could use your blog to chart your company’s successes or new research projects, or you could use your blog to post links to any interesting things you find on the web related to your business. If you can create something that’s an interesting or useful read for your prospective customers, you should have no trouble building links – and that’s what it’s all about.
- Each time you add an article on your website, mention it in your blog and link to it using good keywords (hint, use the keyword tools mentioned previously).
- Try to build deep links to the content pages on your site, both from your own blog, front page and from external websites. The links should ideally be good keywords (use the keyword tools) relating to the article, rather than the name of your business as this ties the keywords and your individual articles together in Google’s map of the web.
- Determine a few of the most important keywords to your business (hint: pick the ones that have a high search volume according to the keyword tools mentioned above), and check regularly to see if your site appears on the search results. Even if it’s not on the first page of results, is it on the second or third pages? Look at the results that come above yours and ask yourself what they might be doing differently. Keep a record of the changes you make and the impact they have on your search position so you tell whether you’re heading in the right direction.
- Check that all of your pages are being indexed by Google. A quick way to do this is to pick a small section of text from each page and search for it with quotes (“”) around it. Do this for each page on your site that you would like to be indexed by Google so that you can determine if there are any pages that are not being indexed. Be aware that it can take Google a few days to get around to indexing new content.
- There may be a number of reasons why Google doesn’t index your pages; check whether you have to submit a form in order to access some of your content (Google never submits forms), check your URLs to see if they look like like static pages or dynamic applications – if all your pages are produced from a single dynamic script; Google may only index a limited number of the pages – see the point on optimising URLs for Google above. Ensure that each page has at least one link to it from somewhere else on your site – Google indexes your site by following links.
- Consider using Google’s webmaster tools to gain further information about how Google indexes your site. You may also consider creating a Google sitemap – this is a special file that tells Google exactly which pages you would like it to index – see the webmaster tools for further details.
- Depending on how your site is laid out it may be worth creating a single page with a list of every other page on your site and a link to it – this is a sitemap in the non-Google sense of the term. You may choose to lay this out like a tree (mimicking the way the links are actually built on your site), or you may choose to lay it out as a simple A-Z index. This can help your customers navigate around quickly but it’s also good for search engines as it will ensure that there is a quick way to link through to every single page.
So that's it for now - this should give you a good idea where to start but you will need to keep monitoring your success and making changes and additions to your website in order to stay ahead of the game - the popular search engines are constantly changing and updating their algorithms to improve the quality of their search results and this means that if you're in the top position one day, you may not be the there the next day. Depending on the competition in your business sector it can be hard work keeping your site in the top spot, but the rewards can be huge as it costs time, not money to get your site to the top, and once it's there, the potential to generate traffic is huge.
Good luck!
