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 In this article I am going to look at some of the key factors involve in getting your website ranked on search engines such as Google. In fact, the examples and information I give below specifically relate to Google, however, since most search engines work in a similar way, the information is largely applicable across the board. So here goes.
Keywords
Your customers find your website by typing keywords (e.g. plumbers) or keyword phrases (e.g. plumbers in Hereford) into Google. If your site has been optimized for those keywords then the likelihood is that the site will be found. If it’s been optimized for some other keywords then it’s unlikely to be found.
So the choice of keywords is vital as the first step in Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of potential customers searching for the site and second guess the keywords that they are likely to use. This is not as easy as it sounds. Don’t just use the first words that come into your head. Try to get into the heads of your customers. They are likely to use totally different search terms from the ones you, as the business owner, would use.
Choosing the right keywords is a crucial step in SOE and if you don’t do it properly you might as well not bother doing anything else.
Title Tags
Embedded in the underlying html code that drives your web browser to display a web page, are Title Tags and Meta Tags. These are set when the web page is developed and they can be read by search engines but don’t appear on the actual web page that gets displayed. That’s not completely true because the page title, as defined by the title tag, appears at the very top left hand corner of the browser.
The title of each page is very important in SEO. Putting keywords in the title tag of a web page can make a big difference to the ranking of that page. Don’t just stuff it with keywords though. The title should be meaningful because it also appears as the title in the search engine listings when the page is found.
Meta Tags
There are two types of Meta Tags. The Meta Description tag should contain a brief description of the page content. The Meta Keywords tag normally contains a simple list of keywords relevant to the content of the page. These days the Meta Keywords tag has very little influence on search engine rankings.
The Meta Description tag is important for two reasons. Firstly, search engines look for keywords in it and the appearance and position of keywords will have some impact on rankings, albeit not as much as those in the title tag.
The second reason though is that it is the description that usually gets listed when the page is found on Google. Therefore the description should be worded as if it’s an advert for the page to encourage people to click through to the site when they’ve found it from a search.
Site Structure
Search engines typically find out about your site using programs, called robots or spiders, which follow links from site to site or page to page. In order for them to find out about all your pages it’s important that your site has a good navigation structure with links that can be read by the robots. In general this means text links.
Try to avoid links that are based on images or JavaScript. If this is not possible or desirable then provide alternative text links, for example in a text based menu positioned at the foot of each page.
Page Content
Another important factor is the appearance of keywords in the page content. Search engines are looking at how relevant the keywords are to that page. Keywords that appear a number of times, keywords that appear in section headings or are bolded will help improve page rankings.
Having said this, however, it’s important that the content is not rendered unnatural by stuffing it with keywords. That will simply cause the search engines to reject the page completely, regarding it as spam.
The important thing is to provide good, high quality content. This is becoming more and more important as search engines get more sophisticated as we will see in the last section of this report.
It’s also important to keep updating the content. A site that is updated frequently will get looked at by search engines more often than a site that doesn’t change. This will improve its rankings.
External Links
The so called “on-page” factors described in the preceding sections indicate to search engines how relevant the site is to keywords that are being used for a search. The number of other sites linking to that site is used by search engines as an indication of how popular, or how important, the site is.
So, getting other sites to link to yours is crucial for getting good rankings. But how do you do this?
One popular way is through link exchanges with other sites. This is OK but don’t exchange links with sites that have no relevance to yours. Google, in particular, will penalize sites that do this. Specifically don’t use, so called, link farms – sites that do nothing but provide links to other sites. And avoid paying for links from such site. Google is getting very hot on this.
The other thing to bear in mind with link exchanges it that, at the same time that inward links will provide a boost for you site, linking out from your site to other sites will decrease your site’s ranking to a certain extent. So you need to be very careful to ensure that you get a net gain from such exchanges.
The ideal situation is to make your site so good, with excellent content, that other sites will want to provide links to it simply because it is so good.
Popular Myths and Misconceptions
In the course of my work I frequently hear misconceptions about search engines from customers. Here are a few.
Continually resubmitting your site to Google improves its rankings.
Wrong. Once Google, or any search engine, knows about your site it will keep looking at it and re-indexing it. Resubmitting it, say monthly, can have a detrimental effect because this could appear as if you’re spamming the search engine. Your site could get penalized.
If you’re asked to pay for a service that will resubmit your site every month then you’d be wasting your money if you subscribed to it. As indeed you would if you subscribed to the following myth.
Submitting your site to 1000 search engines.
There aren’t 1000 search engines. In reality, nearly all traffic comes from about 6 search engines. Using an automatic process to submit your site to obscure search engines, many of which are just link farms that can get your site penalized, is a complete waste of time and money.
Sites that use sponsored links (Google Adwords) will get higher rankings in the natural listings.
This is simply not true. Google treats all sites the same as far as indexing for the natural listing is concerned.
Using a domain name with keywords in it will get you better rankings.
This one is debateable. Personally I think it is proven that keywords in the domain name can make a difference in some cases. However, I think the effect is small.
Whether or not you should do it, I believe, is down to how you want your business to look. Taking my business as an example, I think that www.day10.com looks a lot more professional than say www.website-development-hereford.com. I believe a keyword based domain name is more relevant for a website aimed at promoting a single product or service as opposed to a business.
The future
Search engines are getting much, much more sophisticated at analyzing a website and recognizing its importance. Long gone are the days when you could simply add keywords into the meta tags and content and then hope for good rankings. Search engines are rapidly moving towards being able to recognize the quality of a site in terms of the depth of its content and the degree to which the site is trusted by similar sites in its field.
To use an analogy, when you walk into a room at, say, a conference or networking meeting, you can usually spot the experts, or authorities in their field, because they have something relevant to say and everyone, particularly other experts, wants to talk to them.
It’s exactly the same with a website. Search engines will be able to recognize the important sites by what they have to say, the content, and who’s listening, the sites that are linking to them. In particular, they will be looking at the quality of sites linking in. They will be looking at the amount of time visitors spend on each page, the navigation paths they follow, even what they do on each page.
So, faced with this, how will you be able to get good rankings?
Focus less on keywords. Keywords will still be important but more important will be content. Search engines will be able to recognize brochure sites and down rank them at the expense of sites that have something relevant to say. Use your site to provide your customers with information, not just advertising bumph about your company. Use the site to hold a dialog with your customers using blogs or forums for example.
In the future the sites that rank well will be sites that have been well written, with good quality, naturally written content as opposed to sites that have been subjected to endless rounds of search engine optimization for specific keywords.
And finally…
No matter what you do to your site to improve its rankings on search engines, if the site is badly designed and the content lousy you’re wasting your time and money trying to optimize it. There’s no point in getting visitors to the site if they take one look at it and then click the back button.
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