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Google Optimization Tips

Purpose

This guide will teach you the basics of how Google search engine optimization (SEO) works and provide tips on how to increase your site’s ranking on Google’s search results.

Introduction

Making your website attractive to a search engine like Google’s is probably the most effective way to generate traffic. This practice of improving the quality and volume of traffic through search results is called search engine optimization, or SEO, for short. While the road to pageview heaven might seem like it’s paved in secrecy and confusion, it's really not that difficult to increase your site’s ranking on Google. So before you go and hire a SEO guru or marketing consultant, we suggest trying the following tips.

CONTENTS

A Bot Visit

Google fills its database primarily by sending robots (or bots, colloquially) to crawl and index the web. You can request a Google robot visit at www.google.com/addurl. The bot will browse your site and index its contents. Expect to wait at least two weeks before this happens. You should also list your site at www.dmoz.org. This is Google's web directory and, next to a Google bot, one of the most important sources of the Google Search API. Dutch sites can be listed at www.dmoz.nl (used by google.nl).

Know Your Keywords

Your website is not ranked as a whole; Google determines the relevancy of your website for particular keywords. So before building your site, make sure you select a relevant set of keywords. Check competing websites for keywords / search terms and use the ones that appear most often. You can get an indication on the frequency people search for a certain keyword (and alternatives to it) at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Integrate Your Keywords

The most important elements where you should insert your keywords are the URL (domain name + path + file name) and title of your web page. Note that a low-level URL is considered more important than a higher level URL. Check out the Dutch website Nu.nl for a good example. Notice how every news item has it's own title in the title bar and how every item's HTML file is named after its title. Naming conventions like these are really helpful.

It's also important to use your keywords in the body of your site; keyword frequency and proximity are very important. The higher up a keyword is on a page, the more important it is considered to be. Additionally, text in a headline (h1 or h2), bold or caps is considered more important than regular text.

Check Your Keywords

Once you’ve determined the right keywords and incorporated your keywords into your text, it's time to assess how well your site is optimized for search engines. Check your Google ranking for the keywords you’ve chosen at googlerankings.com. If you have a low ranking, don't worry; below, you'll find some hints to improve your ranking.

Tech and Formatting Tips

First: Update your site (especially your homepage) with new content frequently. Google likes frequently-changing websites; blogs tend to score very well with Google.

Second: Try to have a lot of incoming and outgoing links, especially links to and from large, relevant, high-quality websites. If something can be a link, make it a link—Google will rank your pages higher than others who are less "embedded." This link-relevancy system is called Google PageRank. You can check your site's PageRank at www.pagerank.net. PageRank assigns every URL a score from 1 to 10. If you have a rank of 1 or 2, you're likely to be far down the search results. If you have a higher rank, your site will appear closer to the top of search results, even if there are many competitors for your specific keywords.

Third: Make sure your site's architecture is clean and correctly formatted, preferably in web standards / XHTML. Avoid certain technologies Google’s bot doesn't read. Specifically, don’t use the following:

  1. Framesets - Bots may skip frames or only index the upper one (plus frames make referring very messy).
  2. JavaScript or Flash menus - Only <a.href> links are followed by Google’s bots. Additionally, all JavaScript and comments are skipped by search bots.
  3. Full-Flash websites - If you feel the strong need to use Flash heavily, make sure you have a keyword-descriptive URL and page title, as that’s all you can optimize.

Closing Remarks

Google puts a thirty-day block upon sites that use trivial keyword tricks, like hidden text/div or text in the same color as a background, so don't bother trying these tricks. Detecting and catching a bot with JavaScript/IP cloaking, or using link farms to boost your page rank, are among the highest offenses and could get you blacklisted for good.

Just remember that Google’s PageRank will be optimized over and over to be able to judge webpages the way a human does. In the end, if your site is clean and accessible and your content is good and relevant, surfers will find you and bytes will flow.

This article barely covers the basics of search engine optimization. If you want to contribute your own tips, please post them in the forum. The diagnostics guide from GoogleRankings.com is also a great resource for more information.

Good luck!